How to remove the spell checker

users
#1

I just do what the exam officer tells me !!
As far as I know students with the problems you mention get extra time in the exam and extra help before hand but in the exam itself spell checkersare a no no
Regards
Mal

James B. Byrne , 26/9/2013 5:39 PM:

I wondered if someone would ask
We are a school and sometimes students with difficulties get a laptop to do
exams. Since everyone else is writing the answers the exam boards say the
spell checker must be disabled in such a way that it is not possible to use
during the exam so not to give these students an unfair advantage. 
Best wishes
Mal

If the disability has to do with dyslexia, reading or fine motor skills
impairment requiring computer assistance then would not an automated
spell-checker itself be the normal accommodation?  Who is making these rules?

#2

Hallo Is interesting fact because had here never Computer in school but
that case I have dyslexia my spelling does not count even subjects like
German or English. In my time had we person where I could dictate to
other. I my case that spell check would not kill all mistakes there your
must remove orthography check.
Andrew

#3

There is Fair and their is "over Fair".

As a person with Dyslexia, I know what both of you are saying.

Yes, for an EXAM that will also take in both what you say and how you
spell the words is important. You must make it "fair" for all and not
giving one group a spell checker if the others do not have one.

During "normal" classroom work, as well as homework, having a student
have a computer with all of the language aids is helpful.

I was in "grade school" before there was any desktops and before they
knew about Dyslexia. I was called lazy and worse. I was even called
retarded by a teacher in front of the whole class. They did not know
about these learning disordered withing the educational field in those
years.

I ended up as a substitute teacher for a few years, after a stroke and a
few bad injuries forced me to stop working in the computer field. I saw
what aid the kids, like I was, had to help them with school. I actually
help one kid in one of those "extra time" exams.

But we must be fair. You cannot give a student a spell checker on an
exam or in-class writing assignment when the rest of the class does not
have one. That is giving them much more aid than "fair". For one of my
college English courses' in-class writing, I hand wrote the assignment
and then was given it back to type it so the professor could read it. I
have a "bad hand". Back then, desktops just started to come to the
market then.

What I do not like is the teachers that required 10 year old kids to
hand in assignments on computer printed sheets, or they failed the
assignment since they no longer would take hand written papers anymore.
Those teachers had to know that the poor families could not afford a
computer back then, or if they did would not let their kid to use it.
That was over 10 years ago. I still know of families that do not have a
computer that the kids are allowed to use.

#4

Hi :) 
+1
I think that was one of the reasons for the proliferation of Cyber Cafes and also why libraries and other places started to offer free computer usage.  Most places in the country i am currently in seem to require booking in advance and/or restrict it to just 1 hour (which i find useless because it takes me about an hour to settle in and work out how it works (so i'd have to be a regualr)).  The place where i work has free access and people can stay as long as they want, or at least until we close.  We haven't yet had a case where too many people show up or if it happens someone usually 'just happens to be leaving'.  All very polite and friendly.

Also i'm not sure how much spell checkers really help.  In this country most spell checkers seem to revert to English (US) instead of using our native dictionaries.  People setting up machines here seldom know how to set the regionalisation properly or can't be bothered with it.  One lovely lass said that she thought the computer loved her because it gave her so many red wriggles.  When she found out it was the spell-checker she went quite red herself.

Something i like about OpenSource is that it seems to be better at staying in the 'right' language
Regards from
Tom :slight_smile:

#5

I would think at the first boot/install the OS would ask where it is to
set language, keyboard, and time correctly. All will vary based on
geography. For example, while Canadian time zones mirror US time zones I
believe Canadian correct spelling is UK not US. I think most English
speaking countries officially follow UK spelling and usage rather than
US.

#6

There is some differences in en_CA and en_UK. Some words not the same,
and such. The US drifted from the UK English over the years, and so has
Canada. It all depends on which "foreign words" are added to their
lexicon. I know that Ubuntu has US, CA, and UK English dictionaries
available to use.

UK is the "mother English" so there are a lot of countries that follow
what the UK does, since they were colonies from the UK "empire days".
But you have to realize there are two different versions of UK English
used. "Standard" and "Oxford". French has a few language "versions" as
well for dictionaries/spell-checkers, that are not country based, or at
least it seems with the different ones that are available for LO.

#7

Hi :slight_smile:
Hmmm, not quite that simple.  Countries such as South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, UK (ok, so that's not just 1 country either) each have their own language code.  There is English (ZA), English (SA) and so on.  Most other countries that teach English (as a foreign language or as a 2nd language) switched from using English (Uk) to English (US) quite a long time ago.

Anyway that is all quite off-topic.  What i had been trying to say is that sometimes spell-checkers can be more of a hindrance to correct spelling so i can easily imagine quite a few other cases where people might want to switch their spell checkers off or get rid of them completely. 
Regards from
Tom :slight_smile:

#8

One of the problems with some English software companies it the fact
that they are from the USA and are selling their product world wide.
Sure they try to get the non-English languages done in-house, but many
times they do not have people who natively speak those languages, but
people who learned to speak it as a second or third one.

I really like the LO model where you have the language as a separate
part and you just add the language packs to define the language[s] of
the software package. You then do not have to rewrite the software for
the new or improved languages.

People who use LO in non-English environments are lucky to be able to
have access to over 100 different languages to choose from. There was a
statement that LO covered about 95% of the world population for usable
language for the population.

I would think that is one of the big marketing items outside of the
English speaking countries. How many software companies are willing to
go that extra step to give you all of these regional language choices?
I do not know a single one in the USA [only] that does this. When you
have world wide support for an open source software, like LO, you get
these regions involved into making the software more usable to their
region of the world. That part of the development model is a key to the
growing success for our LibreOffice project.

Yes, LO and many other products use English as a default, but you always
get the option to choose your default language early in the download and
install process. For the Windows version, you get to choose many
languages during the install process, while Linux users need to install
separate language packs post-install. Well that is the still easy to
get the non-English languages setup for your install.

Of course the ability to switch languages is a good idea for users who
have multi-languages using the computer and the LO install. Think a
computer center in a college that has a large number of people that do
not natively speak English and need to create documents in their native
language[s] and have other languages in those documents as well. Having
the ability to spell check more than one language within a document is a
good thing.

Tom

One of the reasons I think OpenSource understands better user needs is
that it is open to outsiders. Looking at the LO English user list
there are a number of people asking questions and commenting from
literally everywhere in the world. The diversity helps one to
understand the needs of others when it comes to software. Also, a
developer from say Korea can join the project to improve Korea
language menus and UI. The problem closed source has is until at least
the beta stage almost all the work is done in house. So if it is not
mentioned or explicitly required it probably will not get done.

*From*: Tom Davies <tomdavies04@yahoo.co.uk
<mailto:Tom%20Davies%20%3ctomdavies04@yahoo.co.uk%3e>>
*Reply-to*: Tom Davies <tomdavies04@yahoo.co.uk>
*To*: jslozier@gmail.com <jslozier@gmail.com
<mailto:%22jslozier@gmail.com%22%20%3cjslozier@gmail.com%3e>>
*Cc*: Kracked_P_P—webmaster <webmaster@krackedpress.com
<mailto:Kracked_P_P—webmaster%20%3cwebmaster@krackedpress.com%3e>>
*Subject*: Re: off-list Re: [libreoffice-users] Re: How to remove the
spell checker
*Date*: Sat, 28 Sep 2013 01:27:15 +0100 (BST)

Hi :slight_smile: Those beliefs are about the same as most people in OpenSource
that i have heard expressing an opinion about it all. It's one of the
many reasons i prefer OpenSource. There are so many such good people
in it, total stars. Regards from Tom :slight_smile:

<snip>

#9

"Kracked_P_P---webmaster":

MSO has very few spell checkers other than US English, compared to LO.

They are immensely more primitive than MSO ones, though. Just compare the English or Russian dictionaries with ORFO's ones. Also, you can have a spellchecker for any language in MSO, like Kazakh or Turkmen. Those dictionaries cannot be supported in LO.

#10

What do you mean by "Primitive"?

Why can not those languages be supported in LO?

I do not know of a Turkmen dictionary, but I know that there is a Kazakh
one.

Kazakh - ???

http://libreoffice-na.us/English-4.0-installs/add-on-dictionaries-large-list/Kazakh-Spelling-Dictionary---dict-kk____2008-09-10.oxt

The key to any spell checking dictionary, is the word list .dic file.
The more words in that list, the better.

There is an American English with over 797,000 words in its word list.
It is not the default installed one, but it is available to add on to
LO, if wanted.

There are several Russian dictionaries that can be installed
post-install of LO. How well they work, well I do not read Russian [
??? ]

Here is the list of dictionaries, and such, that I know of. There are a
lot of them.
http://libreoffice-na.us/English-4.0-installs/dictionary.html

The ones here may have a few that are more up-to-day.
http://extensions.libreoffice.org/extension-center

I have to update some of the files in the "-NA.US" site list when I get
the time.

<http://libreoffice-na.us/English-4.0-installs/dictionary.html>

#11

________________________________
From: Urmas <davian818@gmail.com>
To: users@global.libreoffice.org
Sent: Monday, 30 September 2013, 6:28
Subject: [libreoffice-users] Re: How to remove the spell checker

"Kracked_P_P---webmaster":

MSO has very few spell checkers other than US English, compared to LO.

They are immensely more primitive than MSO ones, though. Just compare the
English or Russian dictionaries with ORFO's ones. Also, you can have a
spellchecker for any language in MSO, like Kazakh or Turkmen. Those
dictionaries cannot be supported in LO.

Hi :slight_smile:  
I'm CCing the international translators list in one this because they are more likely to know technical details about such FUD.

Urmas seems to contradict what is seen on the downloads page 
https://www.libreoffice.org/download/?type=win-x86&version=4.1.1&lang=pick
Kazakh is clearly listed.  So all the menus and pop-up dialogues and everything can be set to use Kazakh instead of English (US).  Also there are tons of RightToLeft languages as well as LTR ones.  I'm not sure if it handles BottomToTop but we seem to have at least one listed.

Ok, so that doesn't have much to do with whether a spell-checker would work but surely all a spell-checker requires is 
1.  the spell-checker engine itself.  
2.  That the language has a font and can be displayed on-screen
3.  a dictionary

The spell checker seems to work fine on most languages.  I'm not sure why you think it wouldn't work with another 2.  We have seen there is a font for it and that it can display well on-screen.  Dictionaries can be created as they are really just lists of words (ok, ideally very, very long lists but they could be quite short to start with because words can easily be added by users (right-click and "Add to dictionary"))

Regards from
Tom :slight_smile:

#12

Hi Tom, *,

[…]
Ok, so that doesn't have much to do with whether a spell-checker would

work but surely all a spell-checker requires is

1. the spell-checker engine itself.

That is a given. LO uses hunspell itself, but integrates also with other
engines like for example the Mac Os X one.

2. That the language has a font and can be displayed on-screen

That is not a requirement for the spell checker, only one for the human in
front of the screen.

3. a dictionary

Exactly. And there it depends strongly on the structure of the language how
complex that dictionary has to be.

Dictionaries can be created as they are really just lists of words

Well, they could be list of words, but this is inefficient. In reality they
consist of patterns and rules to modify those patterns/stems.

Ciao
Christian

#13

"Kracked_P_P---webmaster":

MSO has very few spell checkers other than US English, compared to LO.

They are immensely more primitive than MSO ones, though. Just compare the English or Russian dictionaries with ORFO's ones. Also, you can have a spellchecker for any language in MSO, like Kazakh or Turkmen. Those dictionaries cannot be supported in LO.

#14

"Kracked_P_P---webmaster":

MSO has very few spell checkers other than US English, compared to LO.

They are immensely more primitive than MSO ones, though. Just compare the English or Russian dictionaries with ORFO's ones. Also, you can have a spellchecker for any language in MSO, like Kazakh or Turkmen. Those dictionaries cannot be supported in LO.

#15

Hi Tom, *,

[…]
Ok, so that doesn't have much to do with whether a spell-checker would

work but surely all a spell-checker requires is

1. the spell-checker engine itself.

That is a given. LO uses hunspell itself, but integrates also with other
engines like for example the Mac Os X one.

2. That the language has a font and can be displayed on-screen

That is not a requirement for the spell checker, only one for the human in
front of the screen.

3. a dictionary

Exactly. And there it depends strongly on the structure of the language how
complex that dictionary has to be.

Dictionaries can be created as they are really just lists of words

Well, they could be list of words, but this is inefficient. In reality they
consist of patterns and rules to modify those patterns/stems.

Ciao
Christian

#16

Hi Tom, *,

[…]
Ok, so that doesn't have much to do with whether a spell-checker would

work but surely all a spell-checker requires is

1. the spell-checker engine itself.

That is a given. LO uses hunspell itself, but integrates also with other
engines like for example the Mac Os X one.

2. That the language has a font and can be displayed on-screen

That is not a requirement for the spell checker, only one for the human in
front of the screen.

3. a dictionary

Exactly. And there it depends strongly on the structure of the language how
complex that dictionary has to be.

Dictionaries can be created as they are really just lists of words

Well, they could be list of words, but this is inefficient. In reality they
consist of patterns and rules to modify those patterns/stems.

Ciao
Christian