Subject: Re: repost: multiple language support in Abi, suggestion plus offer to help (non-programmer)
From: Dom Lachowicz (cinamod@hotmail.com)
Date: Tue Mar 06 2001 - 10:43:45 CST
>3. Load multiple dictionaries as needed
>----------------------------------------
>Given the first two steps, we'll also need to keep track of how many
>languages are used in a given document, and then load the appropriate
>dictionaries (if available) as needed to spell check specific passages.
>Good dictionaries tend to be pretty large, so we may want logic to load and
>unload them from memory as needed.
>
>There are three kinds of work needed here. First, make sure we *can* load
>more one dictionary at a time. Second, locate and identify the appropriate
>dictionary for a given language -- currently, we have no way to know that
>american.hash goes with en-US and deutsch.hash goes with du-DE, etc.
>Three,
>modify the spell-check APIs to be language-aware.
I'll give someone a $1USD (1.2EU) if they can do this with ispell :-)
Why? Well, the code is super-crusty, frail, and old. There are about 20
globals in the ispell code alone that will get thrashed. Secondly, we don't
grok a large number of ispell dictionaries, so there's no knowing if your
hash will even work ;-( Thirdly, we need to make massive changes to our
spelling architecture because (right now) we're always looking for
american.hash. The overhead involved to switch between languages/locales in
the isspell subsystem alone will be pretty darn big (ispell startup is
pretty lengthy/resource intensive, as is its shutdown).
I'll make the necessary changes to the pspell code to allow us to do this,
but I'm not touching the ispell code with a stick.
Dom
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