Re: [aspell-devel] Aspell | MySpell

[Kevin Atkinson]

On Tue, 19 Jul 2005, Arsen Kostenko wrote:

> It would be great if you express your attitude towards what I am
> doing.

Based on the web page a few notes:

Move Ispell Into Universe:

  You might need to use the ispell compatibility script.  See the Aspell
  docs.

Build Wordlist From Common Sources:

  I do not support anything but the official Aspell dictionaries.
  Generally the source dictionaries Debian uses are not in a uniform
  format at all and they generally are only really designed to build
  the Ispell dictionary.  Although they sometimes include targets for
  Aspell often the generated dictionary may contain errors or not work
  at all.  I often start with this but manually treke thinks so that they
  work correctly with Aspell.

Aspell and Myspell Share Dictionaries:

  Aspell uses precompiled dictionaries.  These dictionaries are useless
  to MySpell.

  MySpell uses a simple word list.  The downside to this is that the
  dictionary has to recreated every time  the dictionary is loaded.  I
  have optimized the process of creating dictionaries so it may be
  possible to modify Aspell to create them on  startup.  This will
  greatly increase startup time, and thus I do not recommend it.
  Also by using precompiled dictionary Aspell is able to share the
  memory used between processes.  By compiling them on startup you
  lose this feature.

One Spell checking Library!

   Change myspell applications to communicate directly with libaspell:
   Since there are only two programs that really use MySpell this may
   be the best solution.  I have been trying to get someone to write
   a Aspell plugin for OpenOffice for a while now.

   Build a single myspell interface layer to libaspell so all myspell
   programs can communicate directly with libaspell: This may also work.
   I do know how practical this is or how much work it will take.

   Please note that OpenOffice and Mozilla do NOT use the same code.
   MySpell was rewritten for use with Mozilla.

Final note.  To save CD space you may want to consider packaging just the
word list (and other required info) and building them when they are
installed.  This is what Debian is working towards.  See
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=310590