Nadav> So if you tell me what MySpell does, maybe I can tell you what it would take Nadav> to change Hspell and/or MySpell for both of them to cooperate.
My experiance with MySpell is limited to using it (a humble user) :-(
MySpell seem to do a good job on English, but I guess it will take some re-design to work for BiDi languages (Hebrew, Arabic, etc.)
The references that I use are:
The following contain information about the installation of a SpellChecker for Mozilla 1.0 - Mozilla 1.4a
An installation process will usually take a few mouse-clicks to download and install a XPI Mozilla package.
* Mozilla SpellChecker home page (based on MySpell spellchecker engine from OpenOffice/StarOffice) it has automatic installation packages (XPI) for Mozilla 1.0 - Mozilla 1.4 for Solaris Linux Windows.
http://spellchecker.mozdev.org/
* Mozilla SpellChecker - download for dictionaries:
http://www.mozcafe.com/download/
And information about the installation of a SpellChecker for OpenOffice.
* OpenOffice SpellChecker - Spelling and Hyphenation Dictionaries (Download, Installation, etc.)
http://whiteboard.openoffice.org/lingucomponent/download_dictionary.html
* OpenOffice SpellChecker - OOdi: OOodi provides an automated dictionary installer:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/ooodi/
References:
* Home page of Hebrew SpellChecker - The Hspell Project:
http://ivrix.org.il/projects/spell-checker/
-- --- Gal Shalif. Staff Engineer. Engineering, MDE Israel [EMAIL PROTECTED] Office at Israel: +972-9-9711256 x/12256 Mobile: +972 55 243285 Fax: +972-9-9711222
Nadav Har'El wrote:
On Mon, Mar 10, 2003, Gal Shalif - Sun Israel - Software Engineer wrote about "Re: Hebrew SpellChecker and OpenOffice/StarOffice SpellChecker engine":
AFAIK hspell is a totally original approach.
Gal, if you have Hspell-specific questions you can also email Dan and myself directly. But *PLEASE* don't send me HTML mail :)
Anyway, Jonathan is right, hspell has nothing to do with the "MySpell spellchecker engine". In fact an hour ago was the first time I ever heard of this MySpell. Can you point me to some documentation of what MySpell is supposed to do (not MySpell binaries or sources)?
Well, it would make much larger impact on OpenOffice/StarOffice/Mozilla if it could be implemented as an extension of the MySpell spellchecker engine.
Let me tell you a bit about what Hspell is. Hspell has two parts:
1. A system of programs and data files (dictionaries) which creates a large list of Hebrew words (currently, 250,000). These words include valid inflections (e.g., kelev => kalbi, kalbecha, klavim, etc.) but not particles (letters mosh"e vecale"v, specifying 'the', 'from', 'in', etc.). This database-building phase is run only once, during compilation, and creates a 1.8MB file which is compressed (using my own compression algorithm) to a 82K data file, which is the dictionary that gets installed.
Note that most of the work of the Hspell project went into this part, of building the dictionaries and the inflection programs.
2. The front-end, which reads the afforementioned data file and goes on to spell-check the given file.
Part 2 is currently written in Perl, but I already have an initial prototype written in C with greatly improved performance (both time and space-wise). I assume the "MySpell" thing replaces #2. What can it do? does it use a straight word list for the spell-checking? If so, this is not enough for Hebrew because you need to allow adding the particles (and even worse, not every combination of particles is legal, and not on every word). Also good Hebrew spell-checking needs to allow rashei tevot, gimatria, and academy- specified letter doubling (e.g., vilon has one vav, havilon has two) - and I doubt MySpell could do this out of the box either. Or does MySpell call an external program (or shared library) to check each word? If it doesn't that, #2 is still needed and MySpell isn't such a great "gluck", or why it wouldn't be trivial for Hspell to support it.
So if you tell me what MySpell does, maybe I can tell you what it would take to change Hspell and/or MySpell for both of them to cooperate.
I suggest that you download it and look at the source. It's not that large or complex.I wish that I would have the time :-(
Yeah, time is a problem for all of us...
Which is why I cannot spend days on integration of Hspell to every specific software in existance (Lyx, Emacs, OpenOffice, Mozilla), and I need help - at least in telling me what kind of interfaces these programs require.
