Re: [aspell-devel] Aspell | MySpell

[till busch]

hi arsen, hi all,

for quite a long time i have only been reading messages in this list. now 
suddenly i find it is time to write. ;-)

On Monday 18 July 2005 22:35, Arsen Kostenko wrote:
> Hello list!
>
> As you might see, I am a newbie here. It eventually happened so, I was
> accepted into Google SoC program
> (http://code.google.com/summerofcode.html,
> http://udu.wiki.ubuntu.com/GoogleSocApplications ). My project is
> SpellChecking bounty for Ubuntu Linux (
> http://udu.wiki.ubuntu.com/SpellChecking ). The task is to make a
> single spell checking system instead of three (Ispell, Aspell and
> MySpell).

i think this is a very good thing. letting the user (and/or distribution) 
chose makes things much more complicated than they need to be. quite some 
time ago i've been working on kde spell checking a bit. at that time i wanted 
to integrate aspell very closely into kde. it didn't work out well, because 
no final decision could be made in this direction. not even for koffice 
alone.

> After some negotiations with a mentor of mine, Aspell was 
> chosen as the core for the future single spell checking system.

i very much welcome this decision, too. imho aspell is very suited for a 
general spell-checking backen. ispell, being a command-line utility and not a 
lib is extremely slow when it comes to only marking bad words. (at least i 
had found no way to make ispell stop making suggestions).

in modern gui applications marking misspelled words is one of the main and 
most important tasks of a spell-checker. and it has to run smoothly without 
hogging the cpu.

there is also another thing i was thinking about: feedback to the dictionary 
maintainer. wouldn't it be cool to have some standard procedure to send the 
user word list to the dictionary maintainer of some language. in a system 
that is well thought-through words could be added to the main dictionary 
semi-automatically if some number of different sources have the same word in 
their user word list. i don't know what dictionary maintainers actually think 
about this; i just want to share my ideas. this might also be beyond the 
scope of you "summer of code" project.

> Since I am quite new to Aspell as well, I would be glad if Aspell
> gurus helped me with advice.
>
> Probably the most challenging part is developing MySpell compatibility
> interface in Aspell. By this time it would be helpful to learn whether
> task of this kind has ever been carried by Aspell developers. In case
> the answer is 'yes', then whom should I address? In case the answer is
> 'no', then are there any objections/considerations on this idea?

sorry, i can't really answer here. imho it should be doable. do you want 
backend (dictionary) and/or frontend compatibility? well, i am sure some 
"guru" will know everything you need.


greetings and good luck,

- till busch