Subject: Re: Proposed POW: Integrate Pspell
From: Vlad Harchev (hvv@hippo.ru)
Date: Mon Sep 18 2000 - 02:07:21 CDT
On Sun, 17 Sep 2000, Kevin Atkinson wrote:
> 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.
Is there particular need for providing pspell API only in C++? May be it
should also provide API in C - then there won't be problems with linking
anywhere.
As for problems with linking - Mozilla uses a lot of shared libraries that
export C++ API - so their experience with dynamic linking to C++ libs could be
used in AW.
Best regards,
-Vlad
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