Subject: Abiword Spell
From: James Alan Brown (James@jabcomp.force9.co.uk)
Date: Fri Sep 08 2000 - 14:30:55 CDT
Dear Henric , Copy to AbiWord-Dev for any interested parties,
I am writing this email to you with the hope that you can provide me with any
helpful information regarding AbiWord’s spell checking via ispell’s hash
dictionaries.
My gut feeling is that without a full international spell checking facility
AbiWord will be a dead duck in the water! And I know all of us don’t want that
to happen!
The main problem:
Trying to use any ispell pre-built or hashbuild dictionary for the UK fails
with “Magic 2 errors got 0x35”! In fact I can see quite clearly why that is
due to the following:-
The default american.hash file seems to be 30% smaller in size that the correct
american.hash ispell build from americanmed+ (small) indicating to me that it
has been changed for some reason or built in a different way! (any info on
this)?
AbiWords /spell/ispell.h has been changed probably many times now for various
reasons and it seems the reading of ispell’s hash table headers has been
disabled completely and been assigned fix integer values for MASKSIZE, MASKTYPE
and FLAGFIELD and parts of the de-encoding disabled in order to run this small
american.hash dictionary as the default.
These present default settings will not allow users to use Ispell dictionaries
med+ (small) or xlg (large) full stop!
Please note that for UK English (unless you know differently) we can only seem
to get dictionaries of ispell british.med+ or british.xlg that build fine and
work fine in programs outside of AbiWord. I suspect that the others who have
this problem that it is for that reason also.
So unless we redo the ispell.h a newMain.c and put back in the correct ispell
Mask header testing we are all stuck with an American spell check.
All this relates to AbiWord + Linux OS and I am unable to confirm if Windows
95/98 and other OS platforms are affected so if any one can tell me that it
would be most helpful)
I am quite prepared to work at putting this part of AbiWord right and to give
as much of my free time as possible but it would be most helpful if you or
anyone else can enlighten me as to what changes or info you have.
Long term it would be nice to maybe look hard at Pspell and maybe use it but
short term I am trying to provide an easy fix that will enable us all to use
the spell check in our own languages now.
I would like to help or even take over, if need be, sorting out the many
problems within the AbiWord Spell Checking modual.
It would be handy if any one could list if their spell check works in their
language or only the American default and on what OS platform.
Regards,
James
JAB Computers Bristol UK
http://www.jabcomp.force9.co.uk/
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