Abiword 2.8.0 in dPup 482beta5 -- No Thesaurus?

[mikeslr]

Dear gposil:

First, fastastic work. 482beta 5 is beautiful, and its speed and that of Abiword 2.8.0 are appreciated. I'm only on page 19 of this thread, so if this request has already been considered, please disregard the following.

On page 19 you mentioned that the only plugin most people would want was for docx. I'm not on 482beta 5, but I recall being disappointed by its lack of built-in thesaurus.
If you do any serious writing, a thesaurus is invaluable. Sometimes you get stuck on a word. It is not "just right," or you've recently used it, or a derivative, and don't want to appear repetitious. There are, of course, alternatives such as accessing the web, but for "instant relief" from a mind-block, nothing is better than a built-in thesaurus. So, if you can find the time, please consider adding on to your Abiword.

Thanks,

Mike Kessler

[mcewanw]

On page 19 you mentioned that the only plugin most people would want was for docx. I'm not on 482beta 5, but I recall being disappointed by its lack of built-in thesaurus.
If you do any serious writing, a thesaurus is invaluable. Sometimes you get stuck on a word. It is not "just right," or you've recently used it, or a derivative, and don't want to appear repetitious. There are, of course, alternatives such as accessing the web, but for "instant relief" from a mind-block, nothing is better than a built-in thesaurus. So, if you can find the time, please consider adding on to your Abiword.

An offline thesaurus is indeed invaluable, but the problem is that, by its nature, a thesaurus takes up a lot of space and one of Puppy's points is to keep its default download small. An add-on thesaurus, however, is a great idea. Apart from any thesaurus particularly designed for Abiword you might be interested in Artha which is very similar to the thesaurus Wordweb (the Pro version). The big advantage of using Artha is that it is not only a very powerful offline thesaurus but also inherently works with all programs, and not just Abiword, via the hotkey combination ctrl+alt+W (once it has been activated, Artha sits in the system tray next to the clock and volume control).

sikpuppy has compiled Artha and produced a pet for it. Being a full-featured thesaurus/(and dictionary) it is quite a big download (approx 12 MBytes) but well worth it, in my opinion. You can find the dotpet for Artha via this thread/post here:

http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... 204#361204

A nice feature is that Artha makes an intelligent guess (some kind of inbuilt fuzzy logic) should you wrongly spell a word you are trying to look up and suggests alternatives (which usually includes the word you meant). The program works well on my Puppy 4.3.1 system and I imagine will work fine on dpup too.

[mcewanw]

Puppy user Technosaurus has pointed out to me that the simple thesaurus "gaiksaurus" exists on Puppy 4.3.1 (but no menu entry has been provided for it - type the command in a console). It is pretty simple though and doesn't seem to work with a hot key combination from other apps. A quick check reveals that gaiksaurus is for US English spelling only ... sigh...

Something like Artha (as detailed in my post above) is probably what most writers really want (Artha provides spellings and synonyms for both British and US English and provides meanings/dictionary and other attributes too).

EDIT: I note, from its website, that aiksaurus itself (which underlies gaiksaurus) is actually a "set of libraries and applications which provide a thesaurus (currently English only, based on Guttenburg's Moby thesaurus)" and that there is a plugin available for Abiword which allows it to use aiksaurus - so that might interest you afterall, especially if dPup already comes with gaiksaurus (or the aiksaurus library) installed. Artha remains my own preference however. [I'd prefer dPup leaves aiksaurus/gaiksaurus out by default to allow user choice; i.e. provide dotpet addon only].

Aiksaurus website: http://aiksaurus.sourceforge.net/

aiksaurus doesn't seem to be under active development (last download was from 2004).

[mcewanw]

I see that Abiword 2.8.1 became available a few days after 2.8.0

[mikeslr]

Dear mcewanw:

Thank you for the information and link to Artha. And thanks, sikpuppy, for the pet. I've downloaded it and will try it in dPup. If it works, I'll report back here and on the dPup thread.

As a side note, I never ceased to be amazed by this forum and the generosity of the people on it. My post was misdirected: I clicked "New Topic" meaning to click "Post Reply" on the dPup thread. I'm skeptical about a lot of things, but Serendipity seems to be one of the operating principles of the Universe.

Anyone finding this thread by accident and considering trying dPup, should do so. Though still (as of Nov. 20, '09) in beta, it appears to be turning out to be one of the best puppies in the kennel.