Quest for homonyms, cont'd

PopClip
#1

I originally asked about this at Homonym or homophone for dictators, please?

Making my own snippet was beyond my abilities.

But I just ran across a discussion elsewhere in the forum where you mention the Spelling extension. I wonder if it could be adapted for my purposes…

Right now the Spelling option only shows up if you highlight a misspelled word. When that happens, I notice there’s a button at the left end of the PopClip popup to go to the regular menu of extensions for that selection.

What I’m wondering is if one could add a similar button to the regular popup that would take one to the Spelling extension, so that even if a correctly spelled word is selected, one might be offered homonymic alternatives. Since I can’t get the Spelling option with a correctly spelled word, I can’t tell if it would offer me homonyms or not.

As I explained in the other thread, I use Dictation almost exclusively and it frequently types the incorrect homonym.

#2

That sounds like a very useful feature. I’ve no idea what kind of data source PopClip could use for homonym substitution. Any ideas?

#3

First, the standard spelling lookup doesn’t offer homonyms. So much for that idea.

In a rudimentary search, it appears that it would involve using the Mac OS Dictionary Services API, and a downloadable dictionary. Ideally one would avoid using an online dictionary for lookups, because of speed and connectivity factors.

I know there are alternate dictionaries you can install; foreign language, medical, or legal, for example. It seems reasonable that a homonym dictionary is available, then the PopClip function could use the Dictionary Services API to specify that dictionary? I’m over my head here, so just guessing.

For Swift, I found this: Apple Developer Documentation

Apple has done away with a lot of useful functions like being able to add custom words to your own custom dictionary. I miss that.

#4

Yep that’s the API that PopClip uses for the Dictionary feature. However it only provides dictionary definition, not replacement suggestions. There’s a different API, NSSpellChecker, that is used for the spelling feature. This also allows user-supplied dictionaries but I don’t think it has the concept of homophone replacement. It just tells you of it think the word is spelled correct or not. A feature like this would need a custom data source I think.

#5

By the way, you can still have your own word list for spelling, the word list is at:

~/Library/Spelling/LocalDictionary

It’s just a plain text file.

#6

I remember accessing that directly years ago to add items. You used to be able to Add to Dictionary or Learn Spelling in a contextual menu when spellchecking. This still appears in specific, unpredictable instances. Apple has done a very poor job of reading my mind the last few years!