Re: Documentation typos

Michael Fuhr wrote:

>On Thu, Oct 13, 2005 at 09:55:55AM -0400, Andrew Dunstan wrote:
>
>
>>You seem to have lots of time on your hands if you can worry about this.
>>How you spend it is your business, of course, but playing spelling cop
>>doesn't seem worth it to me.
>>
>>
>
>Whether you agree or not, some people judge a product in part by
>the quality of its documentation. Spelling mistakes detract from
>that quality, and since it takes only a few minutes with a spellchecker
>to find and fix them, the effort does seem worth it to me. You
>might consider that statements such as the above only discourage
>people from taking such efforts.
>
>Regarding American vs. British spelling, my spellchecker flagged
>the latter, so I did a quick grep to see which was the more prevalent
>in the rest of the documentation and made them all the same for
>consistency. It doesn't matter to me which we use, but my vote
>would be that we use one form consistently rather than mix them.
>
>
>

I was (perhaps badly) attempting to be mildly humorous. I agree that
typos should be fixed. I don't agree that we need to force one spelling
of common words when many dictionaries recognise the validity of variant
spellings. English is not a precisely defined language - that's part of
its beauty. I live in a part of the world where pronunciation can be
truly mystifying, and spelling can often be also. You learn to live with it.

cheers

andrew (who refuses to spell aluminium with only one i)