Subject: Re: What a wast of time!
From: Kevin Atkinson (kevina@users.sourceforge.net)
Date: Fri Sep 08 2000 - 00:22:45 CDT
On Fri, 8 Sep 2000, Tim Allen wrote:
Hi, Its me Kevin Atkinson. Maybe now I will finally at least get some
response.
> AbiWord spell checking has a long and tortuous history; if you have a browse
> through past mailing list archives (eg last Feb and March) you'll probably get
> a better understanding of why it's ending up in most people's too-hard basket
> for the time being.
I should point out that Pspell has a *very* simple interface and writing
code to use Pspell, to some one who is familiar with the existing spell
checker interface, should be rather simple and perhaps almost trivial.
While Pspell will not solve all of your problems it will solve a number of
them. Why the Hell did you decide to use the Ispell code directly in the
first place. It is far less pragmatic to use Ispell through a pipe.
> The current ispell system is known to be a mess, so it's not too much of a
> shock to discover it doesn't always work. The ispell code is reputedly quite
> horrible, and a replacement is required. Kevin Atkinson, the author of aspell
> (the main contender to replace ispell) has been working on a new
> spell-checking library, pspell. Not sure where he's up to with it; he posted
> some comments about it a while ago and didn't get much response.
> You've obviously gone into this quite a bit, so it seems like you're well
> placed to actually start doing something about this (ie either making some
> sense of the ispell mess, or implementing something else).
Please don't implement something else. Please help with Pspell.
> This issue may not
> currently be at the top of many other people's list of urgent things to do,
> but that certainly doesn't mean anyone is going to refuse your patches if you
> send them! This is free software; people work on what is important to them. If
> spell checking is important to you, then by all means work on it. If other
> people have different priorities, there's not all that much point complaining
> about that fact.
---
Kevin Atkinson
kevina at users sourceforge net
http://metalab.unc.edu/kevina/
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