ConsolidateSpellingLibs

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Revision 3 as of 2006-01-01 05:15:21
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Comment: cat spec
Revision 4 as of 2006-04-22 18:40:25
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Editor: 87-193-49-103
Comment: Added some use cases :-)
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Jane wonders why some words, she writes in Gaim, are marked wrong, although they aren't marked wrong in OpenOffice.

Asdf Qwert worries about the fact that no program knows his name. He is very depressed, because there is no easy way to teach all programs his name.

Karl from Germany, who knows that Thunderbird uses ispell, wonders why Thunderbird isn't able to spellcheck his emails using a German dictionary, although he has installed ingerman and iogerman. He also wonders why OpenOffice finds his dictionaries and Thunderbird doesn't. (TB uses an older version of ispell and dictionaries are installed via xpis.)

Summary

Replace three of the spelling libraries by one implementation and use that one for all applications supported in main. Currently up to four implementations are in use:

  • ispell: still used by some applications, its getting replaced by aspell.
  • aspell: ispell replacement, biggest users in main are gnome and KDE
  • myspell: ispell replacement, currently used by thunderbird, mozilla, openoffice.
  • hunspell: fork/replacement for myspell, dictionaries beeing compatible with aspell.

Dictionaries are currently packaged either separately for each spelling checker, or in some cases, derived from one common dictionary source.

ispell and aspell do provide a C interface, myspell and hunspell do provide a C++ interface.

Rationale

Support only one implementation in the long term, and more importantly, only support the dictionaries for on spelling library.

Use cases

Jane wonders why some words, she writes in Gaim, are marked wrong, although they aren't marked wrong in OpenOffice.

Asdf Qwert worries about the fact that no program knows his name. He is very depressed, because there is no easy way to teach all programs his name.

Karl from Germany, who knows that Thunderbird uses ispell, wonders why Thunderbird isn't able to spellcheck his emails using a German dictionary, although he has installed ingerman and iogerman. He also wonders why OpenOffice finds his dictionaries and Thunderbird doesn't. (TB uses an older version of ispell and dictionaries are installed via xpis.)

Scope

Design

Implementation

Code

Data preservation and migration

Outstanding issues

BoF agenda and discussion

It would be universally cool if we could somehow tie in Rosetta, language packs and this unified spellchecking library. This way translators and users would be using the same defacto list and translators could on the fly correct the list if there happened to be a problem. This would definately make my life as a translator just a tad easier.


CategorySpec

ConsolidateSpellingLibs (last edited 2008-08-06 16:16:08 by localhost)