Spell Check for SolidWorks

If you look in the API section of the SW website you can see they have a Spell check sample it shows you how to use Word's spell check programatically to spell check a single note. You could modify it to loop through the notes in each view of your document programatically without too much work.

Hang in there, SW2006 has Spell Check!

Thanks for the response. I downloaded the file but don't know hot to use it.

Ok, one man's opinion, but really, spell check? In my CAD app? Do I

*really* need this? Really? I'd much rather see the tools in there work as they should than have a function of my word processor rolled in.

You know, "Billy" eats this stuff up... Soon, there will be no such thing as an OS and seperate apps... it'll all be "one big piece of code" that does everything...

Maybe a way to get "paint" in there as well... and a good version of "DOOM" , with WAD editor...yippee!

MT

Surely we can get along better without a spell checker than we can get along with all the bugs remaining in SolidWorks version as of the last service pack released, not even to mention the first few service packs released against new versions. Do we really want the SolidWorks programmers to be working on fluff like that?

Learn to spell, Stefan, or use a spell checker already built in to myriads of other wordprocessing programs and email clients (lazy ass).

'Sporky'

"> Thanks God that the SolidWorks policy is decided not by narrow minded

No, It's not, but if was it'd be alot better CAD tool than it is today.

SW policy is decided by marketing and sales people who don't know shit about trying to use a CAD system to actually design things.

I guess this is better huh ???

You must really be a noob

Mark

Ahh, so Mr. Lukov responded to my post. I wouldn't know otherwise because he's now killfiled on my news reader. But in this case I think maybe Mark M exaggerates a little (to make a valid point, however). In actuality, practically everyone there in management at SolidWorks in Concord has a degree in Mechanical Engineering, almost certainly even the heads of marketing and sales if not most of their departments. Unfortunately, though, an ME degree doesn't necessarily mean a person has shit for sense. It does look as if the tail is (still) wagging the dog as is the case with MANY companies where marketing dictates the direction that allows sales to spin something that seems like it will create more market share, and project managers shove the products out the door before they're ready for prime time. Perhaps it's a more American problem than it is a European problem -- I don't know -- but something about Western society has created some backasswards values in an outrageous number of corporate cultures. Mike Tripoli's story about the electron microscope company is a good example, and all too typical. Sadly, it doesn't seem to me any more that our 'Tres Amigos' meeting with the corporate guys has had a lasting effect . . . if it ever actually had any effect.

And Stefan, go pound sand.

'Sporky'

Mark Mossberg wrote:

I'm with the Sporkman on this.

Come on guys, wouldn't you rather see subscription go on fixing serious SPR's rather than adding a spellchecker?

Wow, everybody's really down on the spell checker. IIRC that was a pretty highly requested feature. Ok, so it's not nearly as important as stability. I'm just being facetious.

The basic problem with stability, I suspect, is that it's a lot harder to accomplish that any particular new feature. Implementing a spell checker is really pretty straight-forward. Stability requires combatting the human capacities to make mistakes and fail to see all outcomes of a decision. The two are at least a few orders of magnitude different in difficulty. Giving up the spell checker won't get us a stable CAD platform. I couple years dedicated to SPs on a single release probably wouldn't get us there. If it could be done, I think it would be. The marketing people know it would sell.

Not that CAD software is inherently unstable. I remember a time when SW was so stable (at least in contrast to MDT) that I consciously broke the habit of defensive saving. It was wasting my time. But the program has grown, as it must, and I'm back to defensive saving. I think that there is some level of complexity where quality begins to taper off sharply if you don't do something to your process to prevent it. I think that something didn't happen in the CAD industry.

In my exposure to the SW process in alpha and beta testing, I've seen some attention being qiven to the quality issue. Hopefully that attention yields results, because the quality trend is going the wrong way in a hurry. I suspect that SW is very aware of the fact that declining quality is beginning to eat their upgrade revenue. I hope they can do something about it, because CAD still has a lot of growing to do in features and complexity. Somebody needs to figure out how to maintain quality in a complex software package, and I hope it's soon.

But the spell checker seems like an odd scapegoat to me.

It's not the spell checker per se; it's the integration of features that, for (I'm guessing) 98% of the users, simply don't need, or more to the point, don't understand. My point is, what could one possibly be doing in their CAD app that requires spell check? I could probably count on one hand the words that one might use in a drawing (i.e. "tolerance", "dimension"), two hands if going for full sentances. Much more than that, and I have to ask why are you using SW as a word processor?

A little off-topic, but related, is the fact that spell check has been used by most, wrongly. How many times have you read a document and found grammatical errors or words that don't belong, simply because spell check "fixed them"? People think spell check releases them from proof-reading thier own writing (it doesn't).

I think that, should SW have proven to be more stable with the release of service packs, no one would take issue. It's not unheard of that a company release a bad update (Win 3.0!, got worse with 3.1, only to be "fixed" with 3.11). But in this case, it looks like things that worked got broken, and things that are broken, stay broken. Meanwhile, we get more "features" (mostly broken) that were never asked for, or worse, asked for by a few, and because they were "easy", got done first. SW has to come back to the idea that the reason that people moved to SW was because it offered a better UI than Pro/E (please, don't start the "Pro/E, SDRC, Ideas, Catia, etc." stuff being better; they're all tools, some that work better than others for people), at the time, was more stable, etc. Now, for the most part, and in reading other threads, people that have been involved for a long time, are distancing themselves due to many, many issues.

Bottom line, and this is true of not just Sw, but other high end apps as well, the people responsible for making the decisions as to the future of a product need to stop, take a deep breath, and return their products to the point that they are stable and useful as a tool. I think that they will find that "word of mouth" about how much people LIKE working with their tools will far out-weigh the publicity they get by advertising 250+ new features that make life harder for the day to day user.

Mike Tripoli

Well it looks like if I install this free program, I'll have made my SW2005 version into 2006 without all the extra bugs! Maybe that's all SW is doing, installing programs into their software that other people write!

Bluebeam is a prime example of a real dud of a pdf writer we would be better off not having. So many better one's out their for free or cheap. If they add other peoples software to the package, it should be top notch and not a dumbed down version of something you need to pay extra for to get it so it has reasonable functionality. Otherwise it's just filling your hard drive with crap.

Mike, I hate to jump in here at the risk of being flamed, but I think you could use a spell checker in your e-mail program. I agree that there needs to be a balance between new features and clearing out the bugs. I don't think the new features should be eliminated though. Does SW ever take a survey and let users vote on which new features they want to see?

Brian

Mike Tripoli wrote:

their

Thank you Brian... ! I was wondering if anyone was going to cetch this! No flame!

Miek Tripolui

Try before you buy. QuicSspell buy Fornada software.

$25 bucks I ever spent on software. Quirky sometimes but so am I. Works in every dialog box in windows including "file save as".