Subject: PSpell (was Re: What a wast of time!)
From: Martin Sevior (msevior@mccubbin.ph.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Sun Sep 10 2000 - 08:03:36 CDT
On Fri, 8 Sep 2000, Kevin Atkinson wrote:
> On Fri, 8 Sep 2000, Tim Allen wrote:
>
> Hi, Its me Kevin Atkinson. Maybe now I will finally at least get some
> response.
>
Yeah. I think that it is time we had a serious look at pspell.
> > 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.
>
Ok I think I know where to look in Abi for the spelling interface so I
hope I can give you some pointers and we can try to get pspell interfaced
in abi.
> 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.
Basically because Abi is cross platform. We can't be sure ispell will be
present on every system we want to be on. Let alone be sure about pipes.
>
> Please don't implement something else. Please help with Pspell.
>
I think that this is a good idea. I can help a bit in about 3 weeks. I
want to finish off my lists work before I hand it over to Luke Jordan.
Then I'm on Holiday for 2 weeks. After that I'd be happy to help. I have
been frustrated at knowing there are serious problems with spelling but
not knowing how to fix them. I don't want to mess with ispell which
appears to be dead code now. I'll have to feel my way but I think I can
work out what we need to change to use pspell instead of ispell. It
probally won't be too hard.
We will also have to think how to distribute a "language pack" for abi.
With luck we can work out how to make this cross platform but right now I
have no clues as to how this can be done. I envision we ship Abi with
English included in the binary but we make available as many languages as
possible on the web site for download. Hopefully these can be plugged into
Abi painlessly. Once we we get other translations for the help files these
can be included too.
To Heinrik: Basically we need someone to maintain our hacked version of
ispell. No one else here understands what has happened to it. I guess we
need to know if you can maintain it given your present circumstances? If
you can't I guess we should move to a more modern spell checker. Kevin has
vigorously offered his services several times and appears he will stand
behind his code. Given that RedHat has dropped ispell it appears the
writing is on the wall. What do you think?
To Kevin: A couple of points you should take into account though. Because
of Abi's cross platform nature we will have maintain our own version of
your code within our tree. This code must compile on the wide variety of
platforms that Abi runs on. All forms of unix (32 and 64 bit). Windows,
QNX, BeOS and MacOS. Are you prepared to do the work needed to get it to
that state or have you already achieved that?
Cheers
Martin
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