AbiWord beats OpenOffice to a Grammar Checker

msevior writes "The recently released AbiWord-2.4 (downloads for Linux, OSX and Windows here ) is the first Free Word Processor to offer an integrated Grammar Checker. We can can do this because we're a pure GPL'd application and so can easily collaborate with other Freely licensed applications like link-grammar, gtkmathview and itex2mml which provide AbiWord-2.4 with a superb Latex-based Math feature. Sun's license requirements for OpenOffice.Org make it much more difficult for such collaborations to occur."

LaTeX

[poopdeville]

What does LaTeX have to do with checking English grammar?

Actually Link Grammar checker is not GPL...

[pwagland]

From the Link Grammar website...

As of December 2004, we are releasing the parser under a new license; the license allows unrestricted use in commercial applications, and is also compatible with the GNU GPL (General Public License). You can view the license here. We are also releasing version 4.1b, which is identical to version 4.1 (released in 2000) except that the licensing statements reflect the new license.

Meaning that it is most likely no easier for abiword to include it than it is for openoffice to include it.

multiple languages

[marsperson]

One of the great things about open office writer is the possibility of installing as many spell checkers as you want, in any combination you want (unlike MS word, where if you're either stuck with combinations MS think should solve everybody's problems (english, french, spanish), or pay an arm and a leg for a third party add-on).

So, does anyone know what localizations of Abi will include a grammar check?

Oh, the hypocrisy...

[crazy blade]

...mod me flamebait, but I can't help myself. So, what's happening here is that:

The submitter praises GNOME's premier word processor in that it can surpass OpenOffice.org because it is GPL'ed, whereas the inflexible LGPL license of OpenOffice.org cripples development.

And what license is it that GNOME's distributed under?

Anyways, I don't get why the licensing issue was brought up, but let me state my congrats to the Abiword, GNOME and OpenOffice.org teams for their good work!

Equation Editing

[SCHecklerX]

I dunno about MathML, since I've never used it, but the equation editor that comes with OO.org models itself after what Word Perfect had back in the early 90's. Much much more efficient to type equations this way vs. markup or gui tools. For example:

x=sqrt((a+b)over(c+d))

would render as you expect (dunno how to show the result easily in slashdot, sorry). Very powerful stuff, especially if you are trying to type equations from notes and such...no need to take your fingers off the keyboard.

Re:Usefulness?

[iangoldby]

I hate it whenever Word tries to encourage me not to use passive.

You can turn this off you know. If I had MS Word installed on this machine I'd tell you how, but I don't think it is too obscure.

Personally, I find the grammer checker quite useful and I believe that the passive voice is Evil(TM). Most people who use passive seem to believe that they need to in order to take the focus away from the person doing the action, and that this is particularly important in scientific publications etc.

All I can say in response is that there are a great many almost unreadable scientific papers out there that are over-wordy, constructed portacabin-like from pre-fabricated sentences, which contain nothing to keep the reader engaged. If that is the price of using the passive voice, then I don't think it is worth paying.

Can I recommend you take a look at George Orwell's essay Politics and the English Language [google.co.uk]? Although written in 1946, he still has a lot that is relevant to say about writing clear and engaging english. (Sorry, I've gone off the original subject a little, but I think this essay should be required reading for anyone who does any kind of formal writing.)

A Writer's Experiences

[ChaoticCoyote]

I'm a pro writer, so I live inside word processors. AbiWord is my tool of choice these daya on both Linux and Windows.

I turn off real-time grammar checking, because it distracts me from the act of writing. In my experience, grammar checkers are often incorrect in their analysis, particularly if you write fiction and technical works (as I do.) Unusual terminology and structure can give these checkers indigestion.

That isn't to say that I don't use grammar checkers. When I've completed a draft of an article, I often run the grammar checker manually to make certain I haven't missed anything obvious or silly. But I can't stand them in "real time", where I feel like I'm back in high school with the teacher looking over my shoulder and nit-picking every keystroke.

Abiword owns

[pardasaniman]

I just thought I'd drop my 2 cents and say that abiword is my favourite word processor.. It is so easy to use and fits in GNOME like a glove. OpenOffice really is a big mess code-wise. Abiword has much more volounteers than Openoffice. (OpenOffice devs are paid) I think in the long-run, Abiword (and Koffice) will be the office tools of choice because of the fact that they can move faster with their smaller code-base, as well as rely on other GPL tools more. Abiword is lightweight, and as a result keeps less prone the upgrade cycle. (YES, I'm referring to the linux upgrade cycle, the kind where applications continue to get bigger, and new computers are required.. It appears better than the windows one, but it is still an annoyance when I think that my 900Mhz computer has the same function which my 166mhz one used to. )

When will Abiword support OpenDocument?

[RoLi]

Is there a plan or rough schedule for OpenDocument support?

Re:Grammar checker? No thanks

[EnronHaliburton2004]

Even advanced grammar checkers still work very poorly compaired to sitting down, reading it yourself, and then having an english inclined friend do the same.

But out here in the real world, we don't often have the luxury of asking an English-inclined friend to doublecheck our work for us. If you had a job, and asked your coworkers to doublecheck your grammar on a simple document, you would probably get laughed at.

I often need to write a document quickly. I doublecheck afterwards, but common typos (it's vs. its, then vs. than, which vs. then) are easy to miss.

The computer helps me to do this work. That what a computer is supposed to do.

Re:This just in

[cortana]

Oh yeah? [imageshack.us]

Grammer Checker- New idea

[Free_Trial_Thinking]

Here's an idea for a grammar checker, I believe it would be a version of a Markov chain.

Take a huge corpus of grammatically correct text, use it to generate tables of what words follow each other. Then check the user's text against the tables. If your text isn't in there, then warn user that it may not be gramatical.

Discuss, discuss

P.S. Patent Pending ...

(ha ha just kidding, patents aren't for software, silly rabbit)

Re:Usefulness?

[jonadab]

> A grammar checker would be a good idea if: It is well implemented, from what
> I hear, Wordperfect's Grammatik used to be almost always correct

I seriously doubt it, although I have not seen that specific one. However, grammar is notoriously AI-complete, and I have a really hard time imagining that grammar checking is any better solved than translation.

The best grammar checkers available, as far as I am aware, are correct just about often enough to get a D in high school English class -- maybe a C if you stick to simple one-clause sentences (because the grammar checker can mostly handle the grammar on those, but you'll be severely downgraded for style).

There are only three reasons I can think of to use a grammar checker.

The most obvious reason is if your own knowledge of the language is really that bad (which, it seems, is true for a rather larger percentage of the populace than it is comfortable for me to contemplate at length).

Another reason would be if you are sending a document to someone (e.g., your boss or a business partner) and you know they are using a given piece of word processing software, which includes this feature; you might then want to use the same grammar checker so that you can "adjust" your grammar to match its peculiar ideas of correct usage and so avoid potentially-embarrassing green squigglies.

Finally, the *best* reason to use a grammar checker is for entertainment. It is marvelously entertaining to feed the poor innocent grammar checker excerpts of real (and well-written) literature and watch it raise hilariously spurious objections. (Always feed it good material, not bad writing; false negatives are much less entertaining than false positives.)

Personally I would like grammar checkers a lot better if they came with big red warning labels disclaiming any notions of accuracy.

Re:multiple languages

[megabyte405]

At the moment, since we use the Link Grammar checker (see the link to the web site in the article), only English is supported. The program has been designed, however, so that additional grammar checkers could be added if suitable GPL or GPL-compatible programs were found.

Re:Grammar checker? No thanks

[AhtirTano]

ven advanced grammar checkers still work very poorly compaired to sitting down, reading it yourself, and then having an english inclined friend do the same.

What I find even better is to run my document through a text-to-speech program and listen to the grammar. Grammatical errors are much easier to catch by ear than by reading. It's too easy to skip plurals and verb inflection when you know what you should have written. But hearing it spoken makes that stuff obvious. Sometimes it helps catch long, awkward phrasings too.

Re:Equation Editing

[poopdeville]

Compare to LaTeX's:

x = \sqrt{\frac{a+b}{c+d}}

They seem comprable, but I like LaTeX's "functional" markup better. It might seem less intuitive at first glance, but it tends to make building nested structures, like

x = \sqrt[n]{\frac{1}{x + \sqrt[n]{\frac{1}{x + \sqrt{x}}}

(Solve for x.) really easy since it parallels the way functions are built in real life.

Re:A Writer's Experiences

[PCM2]

I turn off real-time grammar checking, because it distracts me from the act of writing.

True, true. Actually no -- speaking as a professional writer myself, I don't turn off grammar checking because most of my sentences pass with no difficulty. Typically when I see something with a wavy green underline, I stop and ask, "Really? Really really?" And then I think about it for a second -- which is good -- and then decide, "No, that's BS, this thing is totally braindead," and continue.

But that's just it, though, you and I are professional writers. I want to hear from Joe Business Manager. The bulk of the English that gets written is written by people with no recollection of any formal training in writing. I'm always curious whether automatic grammar checkers are any use to those kinds of people. I suspect that they are.

Re:Usefulness?

[Anonymous Coward]

Except that it isn't very useful. It tags just about every sentence sporting a contraction, and I have absolutely no idea how you're supposed to set any of it's features (assuming that this is possible) - like not flagging fragments etc. And it doesn't work on any locale other than US English. You'd think that the UK would be supported, but it isn't. Sigh. I actually *really* like the idea of a great FOSS grammar parser, but this doesn't seem to be it.

Re:Grammar checker? No thanks

[Anonymous Coward]

Obviously you haven't tried to write in another language with LyX. Last time I tried to use it to write Greek I failed misserably.

But I would be unfair if I said that it is LyX's fault, because it isn't. There are serious problems with TeX and other variants like web2c or even omega. Now if you write only in English or a couple of other "latin" languages chances are that you will probably get away without bouncing into those problems. But to try to write in other languages, IMHO you have to really really know what you are doing. Or, you may start easily and then in the middle of you paper discover that for example you can't carry out a certain function and you have to find ugly workarounds.

Ac couple of years ago I decided to learn to use omega (which is basically a better version of TeX in terms of internationalization) and lamba (lambda is to omega what LaTeX is to TeX). The conclusion I reached is that one must make a tremendous investment of time to learn all these things while all his other friends will be happily writing away in their Wysiwyg editors and -guess what- their result may even be better. And that's because they have lots of fonts to choose from, they have spellcheckers to correct your typos, they have all kinds of nifty functions to help you get your work done. And all these while YOU are struggling to get a simple document to transform itself from tex to dvi to ps of pdf and for a reason beyond your comprehension some command bombs. And if you are one of those that will not quit easily, alas! You will be confronted with seriously incomplete documentation written by people that assume that you know just about everything on the subject and -hurray!- is itself in an obscure format that you have to convert to pdf to read.

Well sorry for the ranting, I just wanted to say that LyX (IMHO always) won't save you if you are going to have problems and I got carried away.

Re:Usefulness?

[gordo3000]

I take it you've never tried to type of paper filled with foreign words and/or foreign names? For me, that is the only time I use auto-complete but during those times, it is the most useful feature I have ever run across. I used to have to type the word without any of the accents the entire way through and then go back and do a 'find and replace'. Now I can type it once and it will always complete it that way.

Physics papers would be a real bitch if I didn't have that option(Schrodinger is a key example).

Multiple spell checks already available

[megabyte405]

Of course, my comment didn't mention that AbiWord already has access to many spell checking dictionaries. On most Linux-like systems, AbiWord uses Enchant, which provides access to ASpell, HSpell, and other spell checking engines and dictionaries. On Mac, AbiWord connects to AppleSpell, providing access to all dictionaries included there. On Windows, a variety of dictionaries are available for download both in the initial installer as well as after installation from the AbiSource web site.

Re:A Writer's Experiences

[ChaoticCoyote]

pcm2: But that's just it, though, you and I are professional writers. I want to hear from Joe Business Manager.

I have yet to see any evidence that non-pro writers use spell checkers, much less grammar checkers. I just had a contract come in from a Big Name Company, and it's riddled with strange errors; I've received business and professional e-mails that make me cringe. My feeling is that many (most?) non-pros really don't care if their prose stinks. ;)

Re:Usefulness?

[Krach42]

Well, the real problem here is actually to native English speakers. Many languages have clear and accurate responses to negative questions. Let's take some examples, starting with English, then we'll touch Japanese, then German. All sentences given are grammatically/semantically correct responses for the respective language.

In English, the speaker agrees his "yes/no" response with his sentence. Thus, you use "no" only when you're responding with sentence in the negative.
Did you watch TV? No, I didn't watch TV.
Did you watch TV? Yes, I did watch TV.
Did you not watch TV? No, I didn't watch TV.
Did you not watch TV? Yes, I did watch TV.

In Japanese, the speaker's "hai/iie" response to the affirmation or negation of the question. This matches English for the positive, but is opposite for the negative.
terebi o mitta? iie, minakatta. (Did you watch TV? No, I didn't.)
terebi o mitta? hai, mitta. (Did you watch TV? Yes, I did.)
terebi o minakatta? hai, minakatta. (Did you not watch TV? Yes, I didn't.)
terebi o minakatta? iie, mitta. (Did you not watch TV? No, I did.)

In German, you have two pairs. For positive sentences you use "ja/nein" same as English, but for negative sentences, you have "ja/doch", responding on the affirmation of negation of the question.
Hast du ferngesehen? Nein, ich habe nicht. (Did you watch TV? No, I didn't.)
Hast du ferngesehen? Ja, ich habe. (Did you watch TV? Yes, I did.)
Hast du nicht ferngesehen? Ja, ich habe nicht. (Did you not watch TV? Yes, I didn't.)
Hast du nicht ferngesene? Doch, ich habe. (Did you not watch TV? Wrong, I did.)

This is generally why (at least this is the purpose behind it, even if it were not conciously the reaosn) the English-speaking militaries use a pair like "affirmative/negative" for responses. Because the response is consistent upon the question asked (a la natural Japanese).

Of course, English causes even more pitfalls with even positive questions: "Do you mind if I eat that?" "Yeah, go ahead." Since your response isn't a negative sentence, you say "yes" as per reasons above, even though we all know that "yeah" means, "I do mind if you eat that."

Anyways, the majority of people have problems with negative statements, even in their native language. Few languages actually have sufficiently consistent terms for responses to avoid this abiguity.