From: ijp@swan.doc.ic.ac.uk (Ian Palmer)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.acorn
Subject: Re: WordHound
Date: 28 Jul 92 10:16:59 GMT
Organization: Department of Computing, Imperial College, University of London, UK.
X-Newsreader: Tin 1.1 PL3

gta@st-andrews.ac.uk (Graham Allan) writes:
: tim@parcplace.com (Tim Rowledge) writes:
: 
[ et, al. various comments about Word Hound ]

This is attempt number 3 (our news server has all but died here) at
replying to the various comments about Word Hound.

First of all, no "antidisestablishmentarianism" is not there, but then
I didn't create the dictionary data :-). And yes (at some time in the
future, well that's my current intention anyway) be able to add more
data files to Word Hound.

Second, yes I know there are quite a few bugs in it, many have already
been corrected. My main intention for releasing a version so soon in
it's developement (it's only about 3 weeks old, and most of that time
has been spent with my first attempt at fighting with RiscOSLib :-( )
is that I wanted (a) to let everyone know of it's exsistence, and (b)
to make sure I could get peoples "wants" before I got too far and they
became too difficult to add.

To answer the question about the compression method used, it's a
simple(ish) substitution compression where each character is
substituted by a bit pattern (patterns being of varying lenghts). This
is not as good at compression as (say) the LZW (and the like), but
these are no good as you don't want to sit through a complete
decompression every time you want to look up a word.

Next, here is a list of what I have already done to it for version
1.10 (available probable fairly soon(ish)) :

  o Corrected a few major bugs

  o Compressed the index files (now less than 50% their old size)

  o Added highlighting of selected word/phrase

  o General tidy up of internals

  o Will add a space after it outputs a word/phrase if it needs to
    (ie. if one was passed to it by dragging a selection)


Problems I know about and working on :

  o The scrolling problem

  o The 'Enter' window disappearing (see below)

  o Allowing addition of own data files


I have one major problem (apart from finding out how to hotlink to
Impression better) which I would like some info on.

When you have entered a word into the 'Enter' window it would be nice
if the caret returned to whereever it was before you entered the word
into that window. This is currently provided by the fact that to be
able to enter a word you need to first bring up the 'Enter' window
which allows the program to note where the caret is before this
happens. And as the window disappears each time you enter a word there
is no real problem with this, except it's annoying.

The problem is that if I make the window remain open, next time you
use it the caret might be somewhere else, and so the program will be
unable to get a correct caret location. My question is, is there any
way that every time you gain the caret, note where it was just before
you gained it?

Ian

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Newsgroups: comp.sys.acorn