KDE 4: Sonnet library

Here is another interesting article about a part of what will eventually become KDE 4. This is about the Sonnet library which I haven't really read about before, but seems to be yet another very nice improvement of KDE and yet another thing which I haven't really seen anywhere else, at least not as nicely integrated as this:

Because Sonnet is a library accessible to all KDE applications, Rideout foresees applications beyond text editing programs. Its language detection feature is particularly ripe for unexpected usage. Sonnet is capable of determining the language a text is written in given about 20 characters of data. This feature already works for several dozen languages. According to Rideout, the Strigi desktop search developers are considering integrating language detection into their application's search features. Perhaps users will, one day, be able to search for "documents written in Spanish within the past week."

Rideout, who recently earned his bachelor's degree in linguistics, says that improved multilingual support is the "most requested change" from KDE 3 and it is here where language detection has the most potential. He says, "Users will be able to have documents checked for correctness in a fine-grained manner. Any separate section of a document (by default, this means a paragraph) will be checked in its respective language by the tools available for that language. For convenience, each section will have its language detected automatically, with the option of a user disabling or overriding the detection."

That is something which have bothered me a bit for quite a while - I write in both danish and english, having a system that automatically figures out what language I'm using would be pretty neat. That this will work and be integrated into the entire desktop is quite nice and I think this is where KDE compares positively with the competition and have done so for quite a few years.