My best source for information is the development team of StarOffice/OpenOffice at Germany - I will contact them and then send an update to the list.
An educated guess is:
* That the SpellChecker is an API within Mozilla/OpenOffice/StarOffice.
* MySpell was used for the first API implementation that is specific for western languages.
* The upcoming versions of Mozilla (1.3?) and OpenOffice (1.1) StarOffice (6.1) should have a SpellChecker API that should also support BiDi languages.
Here are the relevant quotes:
From http://spellchecker.mozdev.org/
Currently the Mozilla developers are working on a general spell checker interface that should be ready for Mozilla 1.3 (See Bug 180346 <http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=180346> and Bug 129704 <http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=129704>). This new interface is based on the ideas developed here by David Einstein. Once this new code is checked into the Mozilla source tree, the *spellchecker* will be modified to fit the new interface. Ideally, the spellchecker code will then be checked into the Mozilla trunk, where it will live happily ever after.
The same should also hold for OpenOffice/StarOffice: > http://whiteboard.openoffice.org/lingucomponent/download_dictionary.html
-- --- 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":
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.)
I guess it is doing a good job, but what I was wondering was *what* job was it doing. Was it some sort of API, or glue, between openoffice/mozilla and the spell-checking program, or is it itself the spellchecking program? If it is itself the spell-checking program, how does it work - does it read some sort of word list like ispell does? Or does it it do something else?
The references that I use are:
http://spellchecker.mozdev.org/
http://www.mozcafe.com/download/
http://whiteboard.openoffice.org/lingucomponent/download_dictionary.html
Thanks for the links, which you already gave previously. But these all appear (after a very cursory examination) download sites, not something I could read to find out what MySpell is actually supposed to do, let alone tell me what I might need to do to interface it or add a new language to it.
