Use of Different Spelling Tables

[schferk]

Search for "spelling" gives several hits here. Some people have been asking for a function that will put off the auto correct function within a given item / sub-tree, and they are even asking for this in different threads - question of bad title giving to some existing ones on the subject. (Obvious solution, as stated by some : assign a toggle to a handy key.)

As usual, my wishes go a lot further. Many people here do their writings in several languages, and even among UR users just using English, there might be many of them who have to work on texts in different fields, and / or who work on different texts where their need for shortcuts has sort of a base foundation but where some terminology is different, let's say different projects in the same field, let's say several legal documents, with different "personnel".

The obvious solution to such needs is to have different spelling tables.

At this time, UR indeed ALLOWS for such a thing, but not in a handy way ; again, UR is MUCH BETTER than "competing" programs, but again, the very last step to excellence has not been done.

There's the file "spelling.act" that can be processed with any text processor, and which is processed by the "AutoCorrect Options" function ; it can even viewed and seemingly processed within a text processor when UR is running, but then, those changes made within the file by the help of the tp ain't maintained by UR, and when closing UR, you'll get an error message.

Between UR session, it's perfectly possible to process this file, be it directly, be it by replacing this file by another one having the same built-up, and thus, by a macro, you can easily switch from one language / patterns / vocabulary set to another one, BETWEEN sessions.

So, if you're working on project a, and then you need to work on project b, those projects having (partly) different abbreviation sets, you must close down UR, do your macro, and reopen UR, which is far from handy.

1 )

Hence, please consider an UR function in the range of "clear current auto correct settings from memory and load another one" or something like that, be it a function within UR, offering a list of such spelling set files, or just allowing for an external macro to replace the spelling.act file while UR is running though.

2 )

I know very well that on top of that, real excellence would be allowance for MERGING of such files, i.e. files having a "common ground" = basic word set for (mostly) all your work, and then different sub word sets for different projects, but I acknowledge this would be too much development work for a rather special function, AND I, e.g., can perfectly do this by merging macros, i.e. I have basic "third party files", plus special files on top of them, and my macros merge the latter into the former...

but then, I have to close down UR in order for my new shortcut table to properly work within UR on restart. So, that's the function that's really needed, number 2 would be pure luxury.

On a technical level, perhaps you could allow for UR's "letting go" of its spelling.act file whenever the spelling toggle is OFF, i.e. then, the user could replace the spelling.act file by another one in the same format, be it by macro or by hand, and when the spelling toggle is put to ON again, UR would reload the file, refreshing its internal substition table on the occasion.

If this poses a problem for people who do the toggle very often, you could do an option "Reload spelling.act file on spelling on / off".

And now, dollar bill can intervene saying he only writes in one language and even there cannot remember different shortcut sets anyway ; people having more elaborate needs than the most basic ones would be thankful for such an amendment though.