More on that marking program idea
Wednesday, May 21st, 2003 04:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
robinturnerAfter wading through a lot of Mozilla documentation, it looks like writing an add-on to Mozilla Composer is not the way to go. The code base is a confusing mixture, and it looks like it's going to be rewritten as a standalone application that doesn't rely on XUL. I'll wait and see what they come up with.
What I'm looking into now is the possibility of writing OpenOffice macros to do the same thing. Again, the shortage of good documentation is a limiting factor, but that should change soon, now there is an official OpenOffice scripting project (which I've just joined, albeit in passive mode). It would have the advantage that student work would not need to be converted to HTML (OpenOffice reads Word documents better than anything else I know - sometimes even better than Word can). In addition, it shouldn't be too hard to port the macros to Word, so those poor Word-using people can use them too.
Things I'm thinking of putting in the macros, in addition to the normal colour-coded highlighting for errors:
"Irrelevant!"
"What is your point here?"
"Please learn to use the Simple Present tense."
"You don't need quotation marks in a blockquote."
"Use the spellchecker!"
"PLAGIARISED!!!"
What I'm looking into now is the possibility of writing OpenOffice macros to do the same thing. Again, the shortage of good documentation is a limiting factor, but that should change soon, now there is an official OpenOffice scripting project (which I've just joined, albeit in passive mode). It would have the advantage that student work would not need to be converted to HTML (OpenOffice reads Word documents better than anything else I know - sometimes even better than Word can). In addition, it shouldn't be too hard to port the macros to Word, so those poor Word-using people can use them too.
Things I'm thinking of putting in the macros, in addition to the normal colour-coded highlighting for errors:
"Irrelevant!"
"What is your point here?"
"Please learn to use the Simple Present tense."
"You don't need quotation marks in a blockquote."
"Use the spellchecker!"
"PLAGIARISED!!!"
