I do not like on the fly spellcheck either (among other nuisances, it
forces me to change the default language everytime I switch from one
language to another). However: 1) when writing short letters it may
be useful; 2) I do not think it is a good idea to tell people what
they should like and what they shouldn't. Just an opinion ... SB
On Aug 13, 2007, at 6:44 PM, Richard Heck wrote:
Sam Lewis wrote:
Of course. And anyone who wants to code this can do so. This was
in response to the suggestion that LyX lacked this incredibly
wonderful and painfully obvious feature. My point was that it
isn't obviously wonderful. Indeed, I'd go so far as to say that,
if you think you want it, you're either wrong or not very focused
on writing. But to each his or her own.
Thanks Richard for the discursive effort! I'm seriously
reconsidering my
understanding of WYSIWYG and its typesetting counterpart. I used
to think that
focusing on writing means also paying attention to the order of
letters, rather
than assuming that this something to do with "style".
No offense intended. But the point is an important one, anyway. I
actually do think that paying too much attention to the order of
the letters impedes writing. If I'm trying to write a paragraph and
know I'm going to change it half a dozen times (at least), why do I
care whether each word has been spelled correctly? That's clean-up,
to be done once I've got the damn thing moderately stable. (That's
why I still write so much with pen and paper, because it's the only
way I know to really get rid of ALL the distractions.) Writing is
hard, and I am firmly convinced that the tools we have grown
accustomed to do not make our lives easier. Those bad habits are
hard to unlearn, especially if you're not even aware you've got them.
If I'm just writing a letter, then maybe that's different, but even
then I'm not sure, actually.
Either way, one thing for sure out of this discussion is that
perhaps the
boundaries between "style" and "mere writing" are not as clear
cut. Also, of
course, if your texts consists of many formula or a mass of
strings of letters
which are not in your dictionary, a on the fly spellcheck becomes
utterly
pointless (yes distracting!) and should be switched off. However,
this is
exactly what I was trying to say with my (in hindsight probably
not very clever)
example of "humanities" writing. For some people, there might not
be much
distraction (in form of occasional wavily lines), but rather a
continually
indication of your document writing status, which I consider is a
basic feature.
Maybe this is true of some documents, and maybe it'd be nice at
some very late stage of the game, when you're just doing clean-up.
But I just offer the suggestion that a continual indication of the
status of a document that is very much in flux is worse than useless.
Richard
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