Hi!
I am using windows since Windows 2.11 was on market. I am amazed when I
think how Microsoft has changed and eased the use of computers since the time
I had my first contact to a computer. That was in fall 1980 - a mainframe...
Some features in Microsoft Office are very useful, but could do much better,
if they would have been OS features.
I can read & write five languages, although I am far away of being afluent
in all of these. But when writing a Microsoft Word document, say, I often use
the language features, like hyphenation, dictionary, thesaurus, automatic
word correction. These features are at least since MS Office Word 2003
language-specific. So, I could have a user dictionary for English-UK,
English-US, etc.
* Dictionaries, Thesaurus: I think that the new words added to a user
dictionary should not be remembered by MS Word only, but by all the software
that does have language support. If software does not have it (like MS Paint,
MS Write), it is something else. But I would appreciate if a specific word
entered in MS Word would be realised by MS Excel or MS PowerPoint, MS
Outlook/Outlook Express also.
Beside that "spreading" of linguistic knowledge all over the OS, I would
appreciate if it could be possible to add user dictionaries for ANY language
- even if the language is not supported. For instance, I sometimes write in
Turkish, Swedish, or Arabic. But I do not have a spell checker for it. It
would be nice if I could create a OS-specific user dictionary for Turkish-TR
or Arabic-KSA, say, that contains all words I use. It would be tedious at
first to check each typed words, but it would soon be helpful.
* Concerning auto correction, it would be helpful for me in Turkish and
Arabic. In Turkish, a lot of hyphens could be used, but most people are
reluctant to do so. Normally, a voval is read short. If this is not the case,
a circumflex is added on top of it. But people do it only in case there is a
possibility to confuse.
In Arabic, I have only some part of the basic knowledge. Everybody who is
affluent in this language does not write most of the short vovals are not
written. This is similar to Hebrew. For me, it would make sense to add auto
corrections that would replace, whenever unambiguous, a word by its
"vovalled" equivalent. And this should work, after being added by the
automatic correction part of the OS to the user dictionary, in every software
that uses the language support.
Best regards!
--
sae1962
