Wednesday, July 08, 2009

Followup on Kate's on-the-fly spellchecking

As there was a lot of feedback in the last blog, I'll answer some of the questions here.

> Where can I get this patch?
The relevant subversion revisions are r992778, r992779, r992780, r992784.

> Will it be available in 4.3, or only in 4.4?
As KDE 4.3 will be released end of the month, this feature will be available in KDE 4.4 and not earlier.

> Please, please tell me that it's powered by Sonnet, one of the most awaited KDE4 pillar by me...
Yes, it uses Sonnet :)
The old spellcheck dialog however still uses the old spellchecking code without Sonnet. Any volunteers to port this? Also, the on-the-fly spellchecking needs to be more configurable in Kate's config dialog, e.g. selecting the correct language.

> Thanks so much, this was the feature I was mostly longing for in kate.
Yes, it is one of the oldest reports with 1245 votes!

> What languages are supported support?
On-the-fly spellchecking works if the specific itemDatas are marked with spellChecking="true" or "1" in the xml highlighting definition files. UPDATE: On-the-fly spellchecking is enabled for all itemDatas by default in the xml highlighting defintion files. To disable it, you have to add spellChecking="false" or "0" to an itemData, e.g. at the end of the cpp.xml file:

<itemDatas>
<itemData name="Normal Text" spellChecking="0" />
...
<itemData name="String" />
<itemData name="String Char" spellChecking="0" />
<itemData name="Comment" />
<itemData name="Symbol" spellChecking="0" />
...
</itemData>

So we have to go through all .xml files and change the relevant parts in the itemDatas section. And that's where we need your help, as we don't know all the languages :) ...and if you want to test this feature, you first have to enable it in Tools > On-the-fly spellchecking.
PS: Is there a better name? Maybe Inline spellchecking? Any linguistic experts around? :)

Tuesday, July 07, 2009

On-the-fly spellchecking in Kate

Christoph just added an awesome and long awaited feature: on-the-fly spellchecking. 'Kate's xml highlighting files now have an additional attribute in the itemData section: spellChecking="true/false". C++ comments and strings can be spellchecked now :) Same for all other languages such as Latex. Really big thanks to Michel Ludwig for the patch, good work! Screenshot for latex highlighting: