McEs, A Hacker Life: Spell-checking gtk-docs

Monday, January 08, 2007

Spell-checking gtk-docs

Motivated by Andrew Cowie's Spell-checking Java source code, I decided to give it a try on Pango. So I ended up spell-checking Pango's and cairo's documentation, fixing more than 100 typos in Pango's, and some 40 in cairo. Not bad for a three hour work.

Unlike Andrew, I didn't directly spell-check source code. What would have been too intrusive. Instead, I extracted gtk-doc blocks (and other block comments) out of source code:

$ grep '^[ /][*]' *.c > docs

Then spell-checked docs, and finally diffed docs.bak and docs and went over the changes, applying them to source code manually. For the sgml template files it was easier, just spell-checked the files directly.

The idea is to use "Add to list" as few times as possible. For example, Pango API has lots of parameter names "ink_rect" and "logical_rect". But instead of adding "rect" to the spell-check dictionary, I preferred "Ignor"ing everytime it nagged about the "rect" in "ink_rect", but it did help catch a couple places that "rect" was used in a sentence. And I replaced those with "rectangle".

Labels: cairo, documentation, gtk-doc, pango, spellcheck

¶ 9:00 PM

Comments:

Have you considered running gnu style and diction on the docs?
http://www.gnu.org/software/diction/diction.html

It is something I've been meaning to do for years now. Would be great if we could get all the documentation to a fully quantifyable reading level.

# posted by

Anonymous : January 09, 2007 7:24 PM

vim7 can check spelling of comments and strings on the fly.

# posted by

Anonymous : January 09, 2007 7:38 PM

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