Snow Leopard's spell checker means something different

[donb]

It has been widely assumed that the "Automatic by Language" feature of the spell checker simply does not work in Mellel. I decided this morning to work out what exactly the problem really is. I discovered something quite interesting.

Users of Mellel have largely been assuming that because Mellel is by nature a multi-language program, "Automatic by Language" must, or at the least should, mean that the spell checker will check the text of each language used in a document by making use of an ability to identify which language a particular text is in and which dictionary is appropriate for that particular language. It turns out that this assumption is quite incorrect. In fact, it means something rather different.

In all, I tried out the spell checker with several languages -- American English, French, Spanish, German, and Esperanto -- using Apple's own programs TextEdit, and Pages, also Nisus, as well as Mellel. I found that in none of these programs did the "Automatic by Language" work as described above. I used some prepared texts, containing deliberate spelling errors in each of the languages. In not a single instance did Apple's spell catcher prove to mean what the users of Mellel have been assuming.

In these other programs, "Automatic by Language" was taken by Snow Leopard to mean: choose the one dictionary installed for the particular language of the specific text of the entire document. In other words, a document written exclusively in French would be spell checked using the French dictionary; a document exclusively in German should use the German language spellchecking dictionary installed automatically by Snow Leopard; similarly texts of a complete document entirely in a single language should be automatically spell checked using the installed dictionary for that particular language. If a document contains more than one language, the entire document is spell checked by the single dictionary which Snow Leopard assumes to be appropriate for the primary language of the document -- it is not always correct in its choice.

Consequently, when using Mellel (or any other word processing program for Snow Leopard) to be certain of correct spell checking you need to choose the specific language dictionary listed underneath the words "Automatic by Language". At the least Mellel does not become confused as to which language is which as the other programs tend to do if a specific language spellchecker has not been selected.

This is not something the programmers of Mellel can correct, given that Mellel uses the built-in Apple spell checker, as do Apple's own programs.

Don Broadribb

[shades]

Thank you, Don. That is very good to know. Once again, our assumptions can mislead...

[macula]

Don, I respectfully refute your claim.

I just tried the "automatic by language" setting of the spelling checker on TextEdit, typing chunks of text in:
English
French
German
Modern Greek
… and English again

The spelling checker correctly and instantly recognized the language correctly in each case, switching dictionary files accordingly. Correctly spelled words were accepted and misspelled words were underlined. This is on MacOS 10.6.2.

So, I am sorry to say this, but the Redlers have missed the boat here.

I am even more disappointed, however, by their silence on this forum. Could it be that we—the users—are more interested in the product than they are? Harsh language, you may say, but nowadays it takes more than secluded programmers to keep your customer base satisfied.

[donb]

When I make a boo-boo, it's sure to be a really big one. And that I have done so is glaringly obvious. I apologize to all and sundry, and promise to be more careful about triple checking what I write for public consumption. Meanwhile, as I munch on my foul tasting humble pie, here is a considerably corrected survey of the spellchecking question.

The facts of the matter are:
1. Text Edit does apply the "Automatic by Language" feature as people would generally expect -- i.e. the spellchecker does indeed make an informed guess as to the language of any particular text in a document and apply the appropriate spelling dictionary to it. It can, of course, make mistakes, This, however, is utterly inevitable in any automatic method of spell or grammar checking.

2. The programs Schreiben, Scrivener, and Bean give the same results as Text Edit: in other words, they also correctly identify the language of whichever text is being used, and use the appropriate spell checking dictionary. All three of these excellent programs do their job extremely well.

3. The program Pages does not allow for choosing a particular language dictionary and does not have the "Automatic by Language" feature. It appears, as far as I can tell, to assume that the primary language chosen for the System is intended to be the language of the document. However, this is the 2009 version of Pages, and very likely the 2010 version if and when it comes out will also use the spellchecker in the same way as do Text Edit, Schreiben, Scrivener, and Bean. I have not studied the details of working with the spellchecker in Pages, and perhaps I am wrong about the 2009 version. However its user manual makes no reference to multilingual spelling.

4. Nisus Writer Pro, Mellel, and Mariner Write do not implement the "Automatic by Language" function. Nisus Writer Pro requires you to select the language, and although it uses a very different process the results are pretty much the same as with Mellel in regard to language switching and spellchecking. Mariner Write in its most recent version claims to fully implement Apple's spell checker, but becomes totally confused and gives up attempting to identify the language when the "Automatic by Language" function is chosen.

In my personal opinion, Mellel, Nisus Writer Pro, and Pages are the three best dedicated word processing programs available at the present time. Each of them has its own particular niche, does certain things extraordinarily well, and other things extraordinarily poorly. Obviously, Pages is by far the best general word processing program, and to a certain extent appears to be intended as a highly developed replacement for the erstwhile program AppleWorks which Apple no longer supports. I often use it when I need to create diagrams, and it has its uses in opening Microsoft Word documents, albeit no program except Word itself can properly reproduce a Word document, not even OpenOffice.

Nisus Writer Pro has a special ability to open HTML documents, better than any of the other programs, as far as I can see. It's ability to work with multiple languages is inferior to Mellel's, but reasonably okay. But Nisus Writer Pro is not my word processing program of first choice, primarily because I find Mellel a great deal superior for linguistic work, which is my primary field of interest. Also, Mellel has an extraordinary range of refinements for working with multiple languages, and to my mind, as a general word processing program it is better than most and possibly even easiest to learn and manipulate for an ordinary "person-on-the-street". Mellel's interface seems to me to be better than the others, although that is a highly subjective judgment. Mellel's Styles management is a masterpiece of engineering and in and of itself a very good reason for a serious writer to prefer Mellel above all the others.

How important is it for Mellel, or Nisus Writer Pro, to implement the "Automatic by Language" feature? I admit that this feature would be nice, but considering how much work it would involve for the programmers, it seems to me there are far more important aspects of Mellel to be improved and other much more important features to be implemented.

I cannot agree that the pace of development of Mellel is too slow, or has slowed down in recent times. The more complex a program's code is, the more likely it is that any alteration will wreck the whole program. Those of us who do beta testing for Mellel can attest that getting something new right, without messing up some other feature has become a major problem. As long as Mellel intends to be a totally reliable program which is well over 99% bug-and-crash free, it is going to require very prolonged preparation and testing for even what might appear to the outsider to be a "minor" adjustment. I respect the integrity and dedication of Mellel's developers.

Don Broadribb

[macula]

That was a very useful survey, Don. Thank you.

If the "automatic by language" function is too complex and complicated, then it may be wise for Mellel developers to focus their efforts elsewhere. I must stress however that, as we all know, texts tend in many subfields of the humanities tend to be liberally sprinkled with foreign words, so the omission of this feature would not be painless.

At any rate, if the developers decide that it's not worth the effort, clearly they should remove that option from the user interface. Alternatively, they could add a warning or disclaimer that the function is experimental and could remain so indefinitely. It is only confusing and disconcerting to maintain, release after release, a user interface command that in effect behaves like a placeholder, producing no results at all. The user is left flabbergasted wondering whether it's his particular setup, his ignorance or a bug in the software itself that's to blame. I would have found the issue excusable if this were an (early) beta release, but Mellel 2.7.3 isn't one.

I did not intend to blame the Mellel developers for a slow development cycle. Their updates seem to arrive at a reasonable rate. But in the spirit of the times, if for no other reason, it would not hurt to put aside a few minutes every day to contribute a couple of posts on the most burning issues that their user base encounters.

[ozean]

3. The program Pages does not allow for choosing a particular language dictionary and does not have the "Automatic by Language" feature. It appears, as far as I can tell, to assume that the primary language chosen for the System is intended to be the language of the document. However, this is the 2009 version of Pages, and very likely the 2010 version if and when it comes out will also use the spellchecker in the same way as do Text Edit, Schreiben, Scrivener, and Bean. I have not studied the details of working with the spellchecker in Pages, and perhaps I am wrong about the 2009 version. However its user manual makes no reference to multilingual spelling.

Since its 09 version, Pages offers multilingual spell checking similar to that found it in Word. You can use the language setting in the inspector to assign different languages to different parts of the text. Works well for me.

[donb]

Somehow I don't quite understand this. I put my multilingual text into Pages. The document consists of material in Portuguese, French, German, and Esperanto. Following your diagram, I highlighted the Portuguese text and chose Portuguese as the language, then did the same for each of the other languages, choosing the appropriate language for each bit. I then chose the spelling checker, which still did not list any dictionaries. I told it to check the document, and it did, rather erratically. When I closed the spellchecker and then reopened it and told it to check the document, it no longer recognized any of the languages and kept telling me each word was not in its dictionary and giving me some sort of English-language word to choose.

I don't know if there is something I have missed in this, but I still did not see that Pages does multilingual spellchecking in the sense that it can identify the language of a text and spellcheck it correctly without being told specifically which language it is dealing with -- much the same as Mellel or Nisus, where you must choose a specific dictionary for the specific bit of text you want spell checked.

Don Broadribb

[ozean]

I don't know if there is something I have missed in this, but I still did not see that Pages does multilingual spellchecking in the sense that it can identify the language of a text and spellcheck it correctly without being told specifically which language it is dealing with -- much the same as Mellel or Nisus, where you must choose a specific dictionary for the specific bit of text you want spell checked.

You are right in so far as Pages does not support the Snow Leopard’s multilingual spellchecking features. But, what Pages and Word do that Mellel does not do, and which has been requested quite often, is to allow one to assign different languages to different parts of a text (and have these settings stick over restarts etc., of course). In Mellel, you can only switch the language for spell checking for the whole document. If you want to check the spelling for several languages in a long Mellel document, this can become quite arduous…

[rwg]

Nisus Writer Pro has a special ability to open HTML documents, better than any of the other programs, as far as I can see. It's ability to work with multiple languages is inferior to Mellel's, but reasonably okay. But Nisus Writer Pro is not my word processing program of first choice, primarily because I find Mellel a great deal superior for linguistic work, which is my primary field of interest.

I would be interested to know in what way you consider Nisus to be inferior to Mellel in its ability to work with multiple languages. Mellel is my word processor of choice too, but Nisus at least supports some (or all?) Indic scripts. The Redlers promised support for Indic scripts years ago, but it has still not eventuated. And to my mind a word processor that ignores the needs of more than a billion people in South and Southeast Asia, Tibet, etc., is not a truly multilingual word processor.

Rolf