Re: More Widespread Adoption of Enchant ...

Hi Kevin,

All those years ago when I started Enchant, it wasn't clear which
spell-checking solution would "win", and this was a major motivation
for me to create Enchant. The major competing solutions at the time
failed in one or more of the following respects:

* Inadequately maintained, or else heavily forked
* Inadequate quality of suggestions
* Inadequate language coverage
* Clumsy (or no) programmatic interface
* Not a shared library (eg. Myspell at the time was a proper part of
the OpenOffice code base)
* Poor (or no) support for Windows
* No support for personal word lists

By providing a common interface, Enchant could work around many of
these limitations and in doing so, provide a passable spell-checking
solution for AbiWord and the greater GNOME community.

Some years later, I think that a clear winner has emerged that
addresses all of my above concerns. And while it wasn't the horse I
would have picked, I must be pragmatic. Hunspell is by no means
perfect, but the perfect is, after all, the enemy of the "good
enough".

While I can see some clear benefits to both Aspell and Enchant in your
proposal below, it's clear to me that neither you nor I will have
enough time or willpower to see that to fruition, and in any case, I
feel it would only prolong the deaths of our respective projects.

In any event, I wish you well and wish you luck, and thank you for the
time and effort you've spent on Aspell. It's a very nice piece of
software that has saved many a term paper for me :)

Best,
Dom

On Tue, Sep 13, 2011 at 9:29 PM, Kevin Atkinson <kevina@gnu.org> wrote:
>
> On Wed, 14 Sep 2011, Martin Sevior wrote:
>
>> With regard to your request for a separate mailing list for enchant.
>> This summer abiword GSoC student, Chen Xiajian, worked extensively to
>> expand the Enchant functionality to allow it to be used for
>> hyphernation.
>
> Is that code committed? I don't see it in SVN (at least on the trunk).
>
>> This was performed in direct consultation with the abiword community.
>> At this point I would not like to have enchant discussion removed from
>> the abiword-dev mailing list.
>
> OK, eventually I am going to move the abiword-dev to a folder.  Can we agree to at least have the word Enchant in the subject if it relates to Enchant to I can have those messages go to my inbox.
>
>> With regard to enchant being used as a distro wide solution for linux
>> distributions, I believe that this was always it's grand goal. It is
>> used by both GNOME and KDE already.  What do you see as being needed
>> for adoption by firefox and/or google chrome?
>
> As I see it, two things
>
>  1) Write the code
>
>  2) Convince the projects to use Enchant rather than Hunspell directly.
>
> The code part should not be that difficult.  If it has to be a plugin than it will likely be more work.  I think that harder part is (2).  Both Firefox and Google chrome use they own internal Hunspell version, and they will likely see Enchant as getting in the way.
>

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