Re: Spell checking (was Re: various questions)

Shaw Terwilliger (sterwill@postman.sourcegear.com)
Wed, 22 Sep 1999 16:14:43 -0500

Justin Bradford wrote:
> > We'd love to have a cooler engine than ispell, and aspell's results sure
> > look cool, but given all the platforms people want to run AbiWord on, the
> > portability problem is a biggie. I suspect that the problems of generating
> > and distributing aspell-format dictionaries for various languages pale in
> > comparison to this.
>
> I was just considering adding the algorithmn (not the actual code) to the
> ispell base. It's language dependent (metaphone mapping), but something we
> could make a configuration option.

Please, unless you have some unholy love of ispell, avoid ispell entirely.
:) I realize adding code to ispell means people world-wide automatically
have the new algorithm when they upgrade their computers, but the reason
we'd like to avoid ispell doesn't have to do with the algorithm it
uses. It's more that its code is just that icky, its build system is
older than I am, and we still inherit all those endianness/byte order/struct
problems from its dictionaries.

-- 
Shaw Terwilliger

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