Re: Fly-spelling with multiple dictionaries

[David Reitter]

On 4 Apr 2008, at 10:47, Eli Zaretskii wrote:

> Perhaps someone could implement something similar in Emacs Lisp?

Such services ought to be provided by the host operating system, or  
external (plugin) libraries, just like with aspell.   A spell-checking  
package in Emacs would handle the UI, and the UI for spell-checking  
and style- and grammar-checking is very similar.  Thus, providing a  
proper API would allow people to interface all sorts of checking  
functionality.

To give an example, I just wrote a 175+ page document over the last  
months, and I implemented two things (very simple hacks):

- re-order sentences by length (in words), so the longest ones can be  
evaluated and simplified manually
- terminology checker: e.g., ensure that compound nouns are spelled  
consistently (e.g., hyphenated) throughout the document

Also, functions like checking subject-verb agreement would have come  
in handy.  Current parsing technology can most certainly do something  
as simple as that.