AiksaurusGTK Developer's Guide

This document discusses how to use AiksaurusGTK in your own programs. It does not cover the Aiksaurus core library. If you want to use the Aiksaurus core library to do something like create a new interface to Aiksaurus in something other than GTK, you should read the core library documentation instead.

Overview

AiksaurusGTK allows you to easily create a modal thesaurus dialog within your application. This is almost certainly what you want if you're doing any kind of text editing software -- the user selects the word, then pops up the thesaurus and chooses a replacement.

Interface Reference

The interface is fairly self-explanatory:

AiksaurusGTK::AiksaurusGTK()

Construct an AiksaurusGTK object. Generally the first thing you do when you're ready to pop up the thesaurus.

void AiksaurusGTK::setTitle(const char* title)

Set the title of the thesaurus window. This lets you customize the dialog, i.e. say something like "AbiWord Thesaurus" or "Evolution Thesaurus". The default title is simply "Aiksaurus".

void AiksaurusGTK::setInitialMessage(const char* message)

If the thesaurus is activated with no word selected, you can pass this initial message to the user. You should look at gtkAiksaur.t.cpp to see how the standalone program uses this.

void hideReplacebar()

If you want to have no "replace-with" bar on your thesaurus, you can use this. This probably isn't what you want if you're wanting to have the thesaurus integrated with your project -- it was added mainly for the standalone version.

const char* runThesaurus(const char* word)

Call this function to pop up the thesaurus dialog in a modal setting. 'word' is the word you want to be searched for initially. Return value is the user's new selection.

Distribution Issues

Adding AiksaurusGTK to your program will incur you two dependencies: one on AiksaurusGTK and one on Aiksaurus itself. These packages both have configure scripts and should be easy to turn into RPMs or DEBs or binaries or whatever you want to package them as.