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Scaling the fence

[ Thanks to dave for
this link. ]

“As a professional writer, she needed a robust
thesaurus – and her experience with the one built into
OpenOffice.org (circa 2006) didn’t meet her needs. Unsure of
what version she used, and clueless on where OpenOffice.org’s
thesaurus is today, I couldn’t offer much in the way of
advocacy outside of the possibility that someone may have written a
plug-in to improve the thesaurus.

“After we returned home, I decided to put the thesaurus to the
test. The candidates? Microsoft Office 2003 and 2007 (tested on PCs
at work – during my lunchbreak of course!), Google’s top
result for “thesaurus”, Thesuaurs.com, and of course my
copy of OpenOffice.org 2.4.1 (as packaged with Kubuntu 8.10). For
good measure, I also threw in results from Princeton’s
WordNet project, on which OpenOffice.org’s thesaurus has
reportedly been based since version 2. Sadly, I no longer own a
paper thesaurus, so unless someone would like to add some
datapoints in the comments, I can’t include synonym counts
for the dead-tree option…”

Complete Story

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