Subject: Re: Proposed POW: Integrate Pspell
From: Kevin Atkinson (kevina@users.sourceforge.net)
Date: Sun Sep 17 2000 - 19:51:29 CDT
On Sun, 17 Sep 2000, Dom Lachowicz wrote:
> Lately there's been a lot of noise on the list about how Ispell just plain
> sucks and we might want to use Kevin's Pspell library instead. I think that
> this'd be nice, since I think he wrote Pspell explicitly for us to use :)
Not explicitly. You where one of a couple. ;)
>
> What would Pspell give us? Well, we'd have a better spell-checker than
> MSWord for starters. Also, we'd be able to shed our Ispell problems for
> good. However with Pspell, we encounter a new set of problems, the largest
> being that Pspell/Aspell isn't known to work on all of Abiword's supported
> platforms.
>
> What to do:
> There are a few ways to go about handling this.
>
> 1) Get Pspell/Aspell to compile on Win32 at least(it is currently known to
> work on Unix).
> 2) Conditionally compile in Pspell support, and also leave Ispell suppport
> enabled. Look at the recent libxml2 addition to see how this is done.
>
> #1 would be the desired route, but #2 is probably easier, esp. if you don't
> have access to Win32 and Be boxes.
As I said before the main problem with porting Pspell is with library
support. I would really appreciate some serious effort on someone who has
A lot of experience with libtool. The biggest problem is getting he
dynamic loading of C++ libraries working on more than Linux. The Pspell
code itself is very portable and uses no Unix specific calls except for
the loading of the modules. If you are interested in doing so please join
the Pspell mailing list and express you interest. I will then reply with
the type of issues you will be facing. I prefer to do this on the list
rather than privately so that there will be a public record of our
conversation incase someone else at a latter date is interested in helping.
Aspell on the other hand is not quite as portable. It uses very
little Posix stuff however it used templates all over the place and
relies on the SGI STL. It also uses a few gnu extensions however
those should be easy to clean up. It should compile on almost any
platform which has a modern version of Gcc available for it. It has been
known to compile on Linux, Solaris, a few 64 bit Unixes (don't remember
which ones), Win32, FreeBSD, and Be.
What compiler do you use for AbiWord on Win32 and Be?
I strongly recommend that once you get Pspell working on Win32 and Be that
you take the existing Ispell code and turn it into a Pspell module. This
way you don't have to use conditional compiling when Aspell won't compile
on a particular platform.
> Integrating Pspell would probably mean
> mirroring its sources much like we do with expat and wv.
I am not sure I fully like that idea, especially sense your version might
be slightly different than mine. I would be willing to give any people
seriously interested CVS access for Pspell.
---
Kevin Atkinson
kevina at users sourceforge net
http://metalab.unc.edu/kevina/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b25 : Sun Sep 17 2000 - 19:43:09 CDT