I recently went to the ubuntu down under conference for a day. There were some comments regarding myspell that might be applicable to all here. Firstly the URL from the discussion.
http://udu.wiki.ubuntu.com/SpellChecking My recollections of the discussion are: 1. myspell has a poor choice of mispelled words. Less than other products. 2. myspell appears to use clear text word lists, potentially making them large. These dictionaries have the same root as other spell checkers but are built differently. 3. myspell does not share personal dictionaries with other spell checkers. We should have a standard place and format that all personal dictionaries are stored. 1. As an aside to the above apparently gettext subroutines have a nice matching algorithm built in. It might be interesting to investigate their algorithms. 2. It would be very interesting to ensure that the actual release dictionaries are interoperable as much as possible. I thought that one of the ispell / aspell clan were going to use the myspell library as a base. We should actively encourage this. We should provide wrapper libraries that emulate the existing libraries so that we can directly replace the other spell checkers. We should provide emulation of other spell checker interfaces again to work for a single source spell checker. Diversity is good but spellchecking in FOSS is painful. For windows we should integrate with the word list of the M$ products as well if we possibly can, at least the personal word lists. Preferably not by import but by direct read and even direct update as an option. The spellchecker could background a check of other common spots in background on startup. Might be a problem for if a word is deleted from an external source so we may have to mark which source it came from. 3. We should work with all spell checkers to achieve this. If we can simplify and work together then diversity is I am not planning to work on any of these things except maybe improving the fuzzy matching. I hope that others will look at this and search for improvements. -- Ken Foskey OpenOffice.org developer --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
