On Thu, 15 Sep 2011, F Wolff wrote:
> Unrecognised words are not only a function of the dictionary. Hunspell
> for the first time made it possible to support many languages which were
> completely unrealistic with Myspell, for example (I can't speak about
> Aspell). That really affected coverage, simply because the dictionary
> form of words is only one of thousands, and the support for rich
> morphology is a crucial aspect of attaining good coverage (along with a
> reasonable dictionary, of course).
Yes and that is Hunspell main advantage. And one of the reasons Hunspell
shoved [1] Aspell out of the way in becoming the dominate spell checker.
As I see the only features anyone seams to care about are:
1. The number of languages a spell checker can support adequately,
2. Portability (i.e. how well can it run on windows), and to a lesser
extent
3. Simplicity, how easily can the spell checker be embedded in an
application; spell checking is not a major feature of any operating
system and thus if a portable application system needs to support
spell checking it needs to be part of the applications.
Any other advance features a spell checker offer seams to be irrelevant.
Even if there is this great spell checker (I'm not saying Aspell is) which
offers all these wonderful features, but only works for a few languages,
no one will really care. Some may use it when possible, but since major
applications can't easily use it, it won't ever get widespread adoption.
Hence why I believe so strongly in Enchant.
[1] Yes I really mean to use the word shoved. Aspell was slowly on its
way to becoming the system spell checker than Hunspell---out of seaming
no where---suddenly started to take over. I have a very good idea
why this is and the whole situation leaves me rather bitter. If anyone
really wants to here why I will be happy to elaborate, but such a tail
is bound to have a some bias in it.
> Please understand that I'm not trying to criticise you, your work, or
> Enchant (or anything, really) at all. I'm merely trying to give a view
> on how things might be perceived by other people. I hope it helps!
Yes it does, and I thank you.
Received on Thu Sep 15 17:34:25 2011
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