Which dictionary?

Here’s an interesting problem:

You have a proper name or other term your language’s dictionary doesn’t know about. You Add the word to your dictionary. Then you share a document with someone else. That word will be marked “mispelt” for them.

Well that sucks. After all, you, the author, went to the trouble of annotating that the word was correct! But if you’re using Enchant, say, and the program uses Dictionary‘s add(), the word ends up in your custom word list at ~/.config/enchant/en_CA.dic or so. And that of course doesn’t get sent anywhere when you give someone else your document. Presumably that’s where Ignore comes in, but astonishingly most applications treat ignore as “ignore it for this session” and when you restart your word processor unbelievably the red squiggly is back and you’ve got to ignore it again!

So really, Add should mean “add to this document’s dictionary”, right? Which implies each document has its own dictionary. Ok, we can figure that out; Enchant has something called “personal word lists” via Enchant.requestPersonalWordList() which ought to make things simple.

Except then there’s the question of the next document you write with the same proper name; you’ll be back to having to add your name. Again. So maybe the right thing to do is to add it to both the putative document word list as well as the user’s word list. THAT seems a bit presumptive, though, and doesn’t actually help the next document which you share with someone else. Hm.

If the document’s word list is in an easy to find location (ie, right beside the document) then it would be easy to copy it from one work to the next. That has possibilities.

AfC