Professor Finds Fault with MS Grammar Checker 607
ChuckOp writes "
front-page article in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer states: "The University
of Washington associate professor has embarked on a one-man mission to persuade the Redmond company to improve the grammar-checking function in its popular word-processing program. Sandeep
Krishnamurthy is also trying to raise public awareness of the issue." He includes some twisted prose that the grammar checker fails to find fault with, such as: "Marketing are bad for brand big and small. You Know What I am Saying?" and "Gates do good marketing job in Microsoft". This last comment is disputed by retired Microsoft researcher Karen Jensen, who developed part of the underlying technology; "Only by knowing that 'Gates' probably refers to Bill Gates -- and not to the plural of the movable portion of a fence -- would the program know to suggest using 'does' instead." The professor also has several twisted examples available."
Oh I See! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Oh I See! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Oh I See! (Score:4, Funny)
That's GRAMMER, you twit!
[...]
Err... wait a moment....
Re:Oh I See! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Oh I See! (Score:4, Funny)
Defenetely.
Re:Oh I See! (Score:3, Insightful)
then/than
begs the question/raises the question
Athalon/Athlon
Re:Oh I See! (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Oh I See! (Score:5, Funny)
Sometime people trying to sound smart are too smart for their own good. The best example yet was related to me by a friend who teaches Photoshop at an adult school (pity him):
Student: "I guess they shouldn't take it for granite that (something or other)"
Teacher: "Take it for granite?"
Student: "Yeah, you know, like 'set in stone'."
Teacher: "...."
Re:Oh I See! (Score:3, Funny)
Re:My peeve (Score:3, Insightful)
Way to miss the point completely. Go and read the post you're replying to. If it exists in other languagues (which I doubt), it's as a bad translation of modern English. Why a bad translation? Because that isn't what the English saying means! The saying is based on an obsolete sense of the word, similar to German pruefen or Italian provare.
If you think about it, it's impo
Re:Oh I See! (Score:4, Funny)
That's rediculous!
Re:Oh I See! (Score:2)
Re:Oh I See! (Score:3, Funny)
You must be new here. Welcome.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Didn't You Read The FAQ? (Score:3, Informative)
Glad to have cleared that up.
Re:Oh I See! (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh, it's not that slashdot readers don't read the articles, it's just that the posters and readers rarely mix. If you want a comment to be noticed, you can't go wasting time actually reading articles, can you?
Re:Oh I See! (Score:5, Insightful)
Noone can do it (yet), not microsoft, and not any serious scientific team. There is no such thing as a usable grammar checker. The reason is that in too many cases you need to understand context to be able to check grammar, and computers can't quite understand natural speech, except in scifi movies. You can make a grammar checker that will sort-of work, but all too often it would just fuck up. Just like the M$ one.
The best you can with the grammar checker is send it the way of Clippy, i.e. turn it the fuck off.
Now, this guy the article is about, he's a marketeer. Them marketeers invented the darn thing, and now one of them is complaning about it, and he hasn't got a clue in CompSci. He does have a clue in marketing, though. This time he's marketing his website.
Re:Oh I See! (Score:4, Interesting)
"OO.org doesn't default to my desired preferences! It is obviously inferior! Back to MS-Word for me!" See how silly that sounds?
Re:Oh I See! (Score:3, Funny)
It's only a simple tool! Use your knowledgebase! (Score:4, Insightful)
It's a tool that's not meant to take the place of actual proof-reading. The grammar checker included w/Word should only alert you to the possibility of some generic issues. If you are turning in, presenting, or distributing some paper you created I would suggest that you take the time and check over it yourself. After you check over it I suggest you have someone else check it over too.
Microsoft calls that the fundamental issue. Responding to an inquiry about Krishnamurthy's examples, the Microsoft Office group said in a statement that the grammar checker "was created to be a guide and a tool, not a perfect proofreader." Microsoft also makes that point in Word's product documentation.
Why should MSFT be held to some high standard for a tool that they include in their software? They should be forced to change it because some college student doesn't understand that "Marketing are good" isn't grammatically correct? Blame the student and their previous education not a tool that MSFT offers.
"If you're a grad student turning in your term paper, and you think grammar check has completely checked your paper, I have news for you -- it really hasn't," he said.
Perhaps require your students to hand in a draft first and you can tell them. In my experience very few professors cared about grammar, spelling, or even the basic content of the paper. How are these students supposed to know what they are doing is wrong if no one will take the time to teach it to them? MSFT is supposed to do that now?
"If you're including a feature in a widely used program like Microsoft Word, it's got to pick up more things than it currently does," he said. "I agree, the English language is very complicated, but I think we should expect more from grammar check."
Come on. I expect that out of my college education I should have at least earned the right to have a professor take the time out of their busy schedule to check over my paper for me. Most would glance over it and say it's fine. I only had *two* that actually spent the time to tear my papers down and show me what was wrong so that I wouldn't make those mistakes again. Does this professor want to do that or does he just want to berate MSFT for not doing it?
But how did a marketing and e-commerce professor become a grammar-checking crusader?
The professor is careful to point out that he's not out to bash Microsoft. But he says the company is spending too much energy on extraneous capabilities, while neglecting core features such as the grammar checker.
Sounds like bashing to me especially considering he's a Marketing prof with a background in e-commerce. I wonder what his intentions really are for this "one man crusade". The grammar checker is not a core feature IMHO. I use it as a tool to give me some quick direction but I certainly don't consider it to be the end-all and I certainly wouldn't tell my students to use it if I was a professor.
Re:It's only a simple tool! Use your knowledgebase (Score:3, Interesting)
> for a tool that they include in their software?
You're kidding, right?
Maury
Re:It's only a simple tool! Use your knowledgebase (Score:5, Insightful)
> for a tool that they include in their software?
You're kidding, right?
This isn't a mission critical piece of software included with Windows OS. It's an extraneous tool included with Word to help and guide people to realize that there might be an issue with their writing.
Re:It's only a simple tool! Use your knowledgebase (Score:4, Informative)
Re:It's only a simple tool! Use your knowledgebase (Score:5, Funny)
I think that it is VERY annoying at this point, and I frequently turn it off because of that. Would I use an intelligent grammar check? Yes, by all means. It should also have an option for "story mode" or "dialogue", and ignore bad grammar within quotes so that I don't have hundreds of errors (alleged) popping up when I quote someone or when I choose to write about a character who uses bad grammar.
Re:It's only a simple tool! Use your knowledgebase (Score:5, Funny)
Re:It's only a simple tool! Use your knowledgebase (Score:2)
I would have rated it "Interesting" or "Insightful"...
Re:It's only a simple tool! Use your knowledgebase (Score:5, Insightful)
What you're missing is the fact that this is one of the hardest problems ever tackled by computer science. Not only that, but even a moderate improvement over what MS does now would likely require an order of magnitude more code and run-time computation, making it inappropriate for most usage!
MS Word does an OK job of spotting the most common errors, but if you're better at it than MS Word is, just shut the thing off. There, no problems.
As far as writing something that you KNOW is incorrect... ok, so you get a green line under text that you already know is a problem, but you don't intend to change. No big deal. Why is this an imposition?
Re:Grammar Check is worse than inadequate (Score:3, Insightful)
It does have one important use that I have found, though. I have t
Re:Grammar Check is worse than inadequate (Score:4, Insightful)
Perhaps. But while I'm also a rather Nathaniel Hawthorne-esque writer in terms of my sentence lengths, that does NOT make it incorrect, nor does it necessarily make it more difficult to read. (My previous sentence would have been flagged in Word, yet if you read it, you notice that it has decent flow and is easy to understand.)
What bothers me the most is that Word's grammar checker assumes you're an idiot. Every single time that I have it enabled and use a semicolon, it flags it, saying "Semicolon use". Based on the way I see that "correction" used, it assumes that the person writing is stupid and MUST have used it mistakenly. Even in the best of light, this method is rude, merely because it second-guesses you every time. I KNOW how to use a semicolon, dammit, and I'll do it when I damn well please.
I can understand why they have it do this; since semicolons are meant to tie two related clauses together, it makes it more difficult to guage whether the two sentences on either side of the semicolon are correctly tied together. Instead, they merely flag it every time it's used. But man, do I ever get the feeling that it's insulting my intelligence.
I tend to shut off the grammar checker and instead I only use the spellcheck function. Even then, I tend to add strange things to the custom dictionary, so that when I use certain phrases or intentional misspellings (such as "dammit", above) it doesn't fuss at me.
I agree with what other people here are saying though: There is NO substitute for proper proofing.
Re:It's only a simple tool! Use your knowledgebase (Score:5, Insightful)
Why the hell not? It's far from perfect, but it still will catch bad grammar 9 times out of 10, so I fail to see how this makes it useless.
Yes, you still have to proofread. However, proofreading is imperfect, especially when it's your own work and you don't have time to set it down and come back to it with a fresh perspective. At least the grammar checker will highlight most of your mistakes, and the false positives can be quickly evaluated and ignored.
Yes, it could be significantly better, but that doesn't mean it's useless. You just have to know its limitations.
Re:It's only a simple tool! Use your knowledgebase (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It's only a simple tool! Use your knowledgebase (Score:2)
I would think that a profs job would be to check content rather than grammer. I don't know much about US high school education, but I would e
Re:It's only a simple tool! Use your knowledgebase (Score:5, Funny)
The latter part of this statement makes me really believe the former.
Re:It's only a simple tool! Use your knowledgebase (Score:2)
What if the tool is being used in education - how can you blame a student if said student doesn't know better? My school has Word do a German grammar checker (yes, it's not English, but the principles are the same) and although it knows to change die to der, send verbs to the end with weil, and so on, it does not catch more complex phrases, such as relative clauses or a few questions. I can look up words fine in dictionaries, but
Re:It's only a simple tool! Use your knowledgebase (Score:2)
Wow, you must have gone to Arizona State, too! Sun Devils in da house reprezent!
Re:It's only a simple tool! Use your knowledgebase (Score:5, Funny)
That should be "if I were a professor". It's the subjunctive mood. Betcha you wish you had a better grammar checker now!
Re:It's only a simple tool! Use your knowledgebase (Score:5, Interesting)
(This contrasts significantly with "whom", which seems to appear most commonly in usage examples, old writing, and references to old writing, like the common title pattern "For Whom the * *")
Re:It's only a simple tool! Use your knowledgebase (Score:3, Insightful)
It saddens me that a lot of people don't have "whom" in their vocabulary. I use it correctly... and I don't exactly have a privileged upbringing or anything. Nor do I know English in any technical sense, so I couldn't explain where you are supposed to use "whom" using the correct linguistic terms.
Ah well. One of the major strengths of English is that it can change, so I suppose there's no point making a fuss about it. But I'll defend my little patch of English :-)
Oh, and, on topic... this is dumb. There
Not only that (Score:5, Insightful)
You have to remember that grammar checking is much harder than spell checking. Basically, all a spell checker needs is a dictonary of words. If a given word isn't found in the dictonary, it is marked as incorrect. You may get a high rate of false positives if your dictonary sucks, but you'll basically never miss anything.
Grammar is harder since now we are dealing with types of words and how they go together. You can't have a database of sentences and check against that, there just isn't the space to hold all that, never mind the ability to generate it. So you have to use hurestics of some kind to analyze the words and see if the match up based on your rules.
Also what the rules are is somewhat hard to decide. Natural languages grow and change. What was fine 50 years ago in English isn't necessiarly fine today. Plus there are different standards to which one might be held. There are things that are allowable in normal conversational speech that aren't in a scholarly paper.
Basically, if he thinks he can make or can point out a better grammar checker, be my guest, but at this point it just sounds like so much whining. He wants perfection in an imperfect field.
Re:It's only a simple tool! Use your knowledgebase (Score:5, Interesting)
A large number of English instructors at American colleges and universities today are either grad. students or part-timers, most of them earning $14,000 - $20,000 per year. Many of these people have 60 to 100 students per semester. Example: I started out as a grad. student teaching assistant. In addition to a full-time teaching load, I had 50 students to teach. I had to balance my own assignments with planning assignments, leading classes, and grading ~200 essays per semester. Later on, as an adjunct (part-time instructor) at a community college in North Carolina, I got paid $24 per credit hour per week. In other words, for teaching a standard 3-credit course, I was paid $72 per week - and I was only paid for the time I spent in class. No compensation for time spent in my office, grading and working with students outside of class, formulating assignments, etc. When my colleagues and I did the math for all the time we spent on these activities, we found we were making about $7.75 an hour. The majority of American students are being taught English by instructors like these.
Different people react to this shameful situation in academia different ways. For me, when I had 400 pages of writing to grade in a week, the only solution was to go over a paper one time, carefully, and to refer the student to a writing tutor at other times. It's not a question of wanting to help, or being too lazy to help. It's a question of the ability to do so. In a perfect world, tuition and fees paid to a university would "earn you the right" to have individual assistance with each writing assignment. Blame the academic world's focus on profit and part-time labor for the fact that isn't so.
So it appears to me .. (Score:2, Funny)
News at 11!
Microsoft do bad softwares? (Score:5, Funny)
Unpossible (Score:2)
Anyone want to go to the National Grammar Rodeo at the Sheraton Hotel in Canada?
Not so (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Not so (Score:5, Funny)
OK. It's stupid.
There. Do I win?
Well of course! (Score:3, Insightful)
Grammar checking? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Grammar checking? (Score:2)
Re:Grammar checking? (Score:2)
This is stupid. (Score:5, Insightful)
Ugly Web Page checker? (Score:2, Funny)
While you're at it... (Score:4, Insightful)
Typical M$ Problem (Score:5, Insightful)
Ms Jensen doesn't note that the example is STILL incorrect even if one doesn't assume Gates is a proper noun. Grammatically, it should be, "Gates do good marketing jobs in Microsoft." Plural JOBS.
Of course, the chances of seeing a Jobs in Microsoft these days are probably nil.
Re:Typical M$ Problem (Score:2)
In any case, this whole thing is stupid. Writing a perfect English grammar checker would be a Herculean task, Microsoft doesn't claim the Office spell checker is remotely perfect and I'v never encountered anyone who thought it was invaluable. And the Slashmob may wa
Re:Typical M$ Problem (Score:3, Interesting)
When asked directly... (Score:3, Funny)
Apologies to the young Mr. Wiggums.
Re:When asked directly... (Score:2)
Professor Finds Fault with MS Grammar Checker (Score:2)
Easy solution. Learn to write. (Score:5, Funny)
Complexity of English (Score:5, Insightful)
They expect way too much... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd rather have a program that points out the typical mistakes that occur when you cut and paste around, i.e. phrases without a verb, or with too many verbs, than one that is giving false alarms all the time. A grammar checker cannot fix a bad writer. Neither a spell checker, for that matter. (Do you write "advise" or "advice"?)
Personally, I don't use grammar checkers (not available for Emacs AFAIK anyway), and a spell checker only if I doubt about a particular word. There are way too many words in the kind of things that I write that make the spell checker freak out.
BTW, I probably made a mistake or two in this posting. My excuse is that I ain't no native speaker. :)
Re:They expect way too much... (Score:2)
You're a big fan of gibberish, eh?
I find that even in technical writing it's worth going through and adding the jargon I need to the dictionary. After the first few papers, it's pretty aware of the words I need and I've caught more than a few typos I would have missed otherwise.
openoffice (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:openoffice (Score:2)
Maybe they should improve the English language (Score:5, Insightful)
--
Want a free iPod? [freeipods.com]
Or try a free Nintendo DS, GC, PS2, Xbox. [freegamingsystems.com] (you only need 4 referrals)
Wired article as proof [wired.com]
Re:Maybe they should improve the English language (Score:4, Insightful)
The flexibility and weirdness of the language is what makes it so popular. It can convey complex ideas in ways that are both odd and profound. If it were rigourously rulebound, a lot fo that flexibility would be gone.
The rise of Microsoft English(TM) (Score:5, Interesting)
I suspect that, in the long run, this will change usage so that Microsoft English becomes considered acceptable. But the trend does frighten me, given the recent issue with open standards in Massachusetts [slashdot.org]. In a dystopian future, open source eye-balls will only be allowed to read, not write, the language.
Obviously Misinterpretted the Use of Grammar-Check (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm far from a fan of Microsoft, but since I work for a literacy program funded by the U.S. Government, I am adequately shocked that people use grammar check for anything more than catching where they mistyped "th estory" instead of "the story" and similar such mistakes. Also being a college student, I find myself re-reading my papers quite often, and generally fixing a few mistakes in my original text. Few, if any, of these would have been found by the grammar checker.
Then again, I guess you could also say I have an agenda to UN-automate the process of checking spelling and grammar, as it seems to me it's growing to be one of those automated features that doesn't just serve in time-saving, but also extends to the dumbing of America. Not just the, "I don't care" kind of dumb, but also the "I don't have any need to care" kind.
Please, get over it.
Funny? (Score:2)
Two words: Proof read (Score:4, Insightful)
By all means use a spell checker but if you've spend days/weeks/months writing a paper, the least you can do is spend a few hours reading it for grammatical errors!
absurd! (Score:2)
I May Be In the Minority on This (Score:5, Interesting)
A professor, eh? (Score:5, Insightful)
So, what we have here is somebody just saying, in essense, "Gee, Microsoft, why isn't your software at human-level AI? I mean, how hard can that be?" and is so utterly incompetent at assessing how hard grammar checking is that they are utterly unaware of how incompetent they are. (Hmmm, that sounds familiar [phule.net], though this isn't quite the same.)
I invite Associate Professor of Marketing and E-Commerce Sandeep Krishnamurthy to try his hand at the AI problems he is upset that Microsoft hasn't waved a magic wand and fixed, though I feel obligated to warn him that as an associate professor of marketing, he's likely to be in for a world of intellectual hurt unless he's got some other source of knowledge and skill squirreled away somewhere, like a PhD in Computer Science he is for some reason forgetting to mention.... Perhaps then he would have some understanding of why even the mighty Microsoft has not yet produced the Perfect Grammar Checker....
On that note, check in with actual Linguists on the feasibility of the idea of a Perfect Grammar, too. You probably have a lot to learn there, too.
Don't I know it (Score:2, Interesting)
The Dutch version of the Microsoft spelling checker changes my name, "Mikael", to "Eikel". This means acorn, in Dutch. "Eikel" also refers to the sensitive part of the male sex. A third meaning is that of "jerk". Needless to say I have never used the Microsoft spelling checker ever since. >:(
Another TM in the works? (Score:3, Funny)
Is Microsoft going to trademark 'Gates' now as they did with 'Windows' so you'll have to pay him a license fee every time you talk about your 'moveable portion of a fence'?
GRAAAH!!! (Score:5, Funny)
Is there a F/OSS checker? (Score:2)
Is there a decent F/OSS grammar checker? Seems like an important project. I guess a probabilistic approach which could be trained for various different languages would work best.
I'd be happier if... (Score:2)
"Only by knowing..." (Score:2)
What do people expect when they expect so little from Microsoft?
That's not the biggest problem (Score:2)
Rules of Grammar (Score:3, Insightful)
English grammar is complex and often twisted in its logic. Its amazing that the MS Word grammar checker works so well.
Interesting link on his website shows (Score:3, Funny)
From his Most common mistakes by students [washington.edu]:
"10. Not running Microsoft Word's spelling and grammar check."
From this we gather that he does want people to use the spelinng and gramer czechs
and
"11. Assuming that Microsoft Word's spelling and grammar check will solve all writing problems."
Which leads us to believe that he has a purpose to this critique of MSFT Word grammar checking.
It's a grammar CHECKER! (Score:3, Insightful)
The only useful feature (Score:2)
You see, Word and Wordperfect have a tendency to forget that I turn their auto-correct and auto-replace functions off, which can introduce errors.
Doh! (Score:2)
I dont know anyone who relys on it, but it should be fixed for the occasional n00b.
Grammar Nazis of the Word Unite! (Score:5, Insightful)
Trying to think of something profound to say, but the grammar checker is pretty short of profound. I use Word for hours most days, and I certainly feel like the grammar checker is of limited utility. The simple spelling checking part of it delivers far and away the most bang for the buck. The grammar checker only contributes slightly, and that's usually by recognizing ambiguities. It doesn't help fix them, but if I can simplify the grammar to the point where the grammar checker stops complaining, then the passage is often rendered more clearly.
I think doing more would require a level of semantic understanding which is still far, far above the capabilities of our PCs, even given their gigahertz frequencies. Trying to substitute for real intelligence is difficult. The only thing I can imagine might be a very large database of examples of good and bad grammar examples, accessed via the Internet. The problem of deciding good and bad would still remain. Perhaps a Wikipedia-style approach with volunteer evaluators?
Does this mean that in Longhorn, Clippy will say: (Score:3, Funny)
Offensive to Lesbians (Score:3, Funny)
The innocent phrase "The dykes which cut the granite are 2m wide" was converted, by MS Word, to "The dykes who cut the granite are 2m wide".
Jolyon
ESL - ARG (Score:3, Interesting)
It did make for some nice teaching opportunities when I got to tell them they were smarter than they thought, but it's frustrating to think that people accept that "The computer must be right" even with something as complex and human as grammar.
Who actually uses it? (Score:3, Interesting)
But I'm seriously curious, do most people try to use the grammar checker?
Open source grammar checking tools (Score:5, Informative)
Linux Grammar Checker? (Score:3, Insightful)
No one uses it! Even when using MS Word, I look at the suggested grammar corrections and say, "Oh, that's nice. Whatever." Then, I go on writing and fix errors myself.
In other words, in order to operate a mule, you must first be smarter than the mule.
Deja Vue (Score:3, Funny)
Me: Type a word.
MS Word: Should be hyphenated.
Me: Change word.
MS Word: Shouldn't be hyphenated.
Me: Change word back.
MS Word: Should be hyphenated.
Me: *Arrrgh!!!*
The /. crowd should shut up (Score:3, Insightful)
Heck, until any other word-processor does it.
ALL YOUR BASE (Score:5, Funny)
The only things it flagged were "all your base are" (suggested "base is" or "bases are") and "for great justice" (sentence fragment).
Grammatical and sociological implications are left as an exercise to the reader.
It's about time (Score:3, Interesting)
I think the concept is a good one, but it sorely needs to be updated.
correct me if i'm wrong.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Even if the program assumes that "gates" is a plural common noun, and not a singular proper noun, shouldn't a remotely decent grammar checker still find fault with this sentence (beyond it's nonsensical nature)? Along with accidentally repeated double words, mixing singular and plural nouns/verbs is one lf the only things that the grammar check seems to actually be good for.
It seems like a halfway decent grammar checker in this case would at least recommend "Gates do good marketing jobs in Microsoft"
Idiot professor... (Score:4, Insightful)
Confessions of a UW English major. (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm a senior in the English Department at the University of Washington. I can tell you for a fact grammar has gone by the wayside. Last quarter, in my advanced expository writing class my teacher gave a room full of English majors a grammar quiz. Five out of twenty people understood when to use "whom". Two people could use "to lay" and "to lie" and their respective participles correctly. One person (me) found all the errors in the paragraph at the end of the test. This is not a class filled with freshman--this is an upper-level English class at a major University.
Part of the blame rests on the complexity involved with parsing language. That particular class relied heavily on peer review simply because editing is hard, time consuming work, even if you know all the rules. An instructor reading twenty rough drafts of a ten page paper cannot reply meaningfully to every one in a couple of hours. Content and structure always outweigh grammar and spelling when a teacher had limited time to really look at a student's work.
The other part of the blame arises from hubris associated with grammar. If you tell someone that they need to work on their grammar, they will probably think that you're insinuation that they return to grade school. I think studying grammar should not be relegated the ESL students and middle-schoolers. If you can tell me what the subjunctive mood is without looking it up or use a dash, colon and semicolon without fear then more power to you. If you cannot, perhaps MS Word's grammar checker isn't the only thing that needs a rehaul.
Insightful, lucid, and grammatically-correct writing is a by-product of hard, relentless work that cannot (yet) be replicated.
Re:Linux Grammar checker (Score:4, Informative)
There's Queequeg [sourceforge.net], which is based on wordnet [princeton.edu].
You would need to feed in text files for these to work. I haven't found any text editors that have automatic grammar checking on the fly like MSWord though. Would be interesting if someone writes a plugin for gedit, for grammar checking, just like the way they already have automatic spell checking which uses ispell/aspell as the backend.
(heck, they don't even have automatic spell checking [on-the-fly] for kate (or kile) after seeing the feature request in bugs.kde.org for years. It can be quite troublesome when editing large latex documents.)