Subject: Re: Fututre Pspell Plans [Was: Re: Commit: Pspell fixes]
From: Dom Lachowicz (cinamod@hotmail.com)
Date: Sun Nov 12 2000 - 21:10:25 CST
Kevin Atkinson said:
>As I told the Dom I am thinking about adding a length fields to some of
>the Pspell methods. This will avoid having to convert the words right
>now. As it stands now here is how the conversion process goes.
>
>1) AbiWord converts to UTF8
>2) Pspell converts UTF8 to some 8 bit format used by the spell checker
>
>as you can see there is an extra level of unnecessary conversion going on.
>
>Pspell can already partly handle AbiWord internal encoding, assuming that
>I understand it right. It is labeled as "machine unsigned 16". However
>it expects the string to have a 2 byte null character at the end. The
>reason for this is because Pspell will simply cast the "const char *"
>passed in to "const unsigned short *". Thus in order for it to tell when
>the end of the string it needs to see a 0.
>
>In a future version of Pspell (perhaps the next version) I plan on adding
>support for a length field so that the string can be passed with out any
>conversion on AbiWords part. Once this is done all AbiWord will have to do
>is cast the "unsigned short *" to a "const char *" and provide the length.
>Pspell with then simply cast it back and then convert it to the format
>needed by the spell checker. I don't thing I will bother returning length
>information sense, as opposed to allocating new memory and copying the
>string, finding the length of a string is a fairly cheep process.
Agreed. There is a less-than-optimal amount of converting occurring. The
only reason I'm doing this is because of the 2-byte null requirement and
because (i think) you told me that multi-byte encodings were "experimental"
or something like that.
>
>Do you think this would be a good idea?
I think that this would be a great idea. It'd save a lot of needless
conversions in the Abi code, which would be a good thing. Once you add the
length argument to the Pspell methods and release a new version (0.12?),
I'll fix Abi's spell-check code accordingly.
Dom
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