dictionaries, aspell/myspell/hunspell and so on.

[Arthur Pemberton]

On 9/5/06, Caolan McNamara <caolanm at redhat.com> wrote:
> Spell checking in our desktop is sort of a bit messy.
>
> At the moment OpenOffice.org 2.0.X uses hunspell, the successor of
> "myspell". Our OOo build has these hunspell libs as part of the OOo
> install.
>
> The various hunspell dictionaries are then bundled in each OOo langpack.
>
> I see that our Fedora Thunderbird contains a copy of myspell lib, but no
> bundled dictionaries (?) So it's a unfortunate that OOo has dictionaries
> for a pile of languages which thunderbird is unaware of, but would be
> able to use without (probably) too much effort.
>
> And then we have our traditional aspell and the various aspell
> dictionaries.
>
> Recently I see that vim has added some sort of support for using the OOo
> hunspell/myspell dictionaries,
> (http://ftp.vim.org/vim/runtime/spell/README.txt)
> But I'm not sure what our fedora vim's status is here re that.
>
> So, here's the hunspell webpage http://hunspell.sourceforge.net
> and some commentary on aspell/hunspell/myspell and firefox
> http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/ben/archives/016618.html
>
> So what would be our *ideal* situation here ?
> >From my side it'd be something like...
>
> a) standalone hunspell (easy)
> b) OOo uses standalone hunspell (easy, maybe a bit of tweaking
>    to autodetect system install dictionaries instead of existing config
>    files)
> c) firefox/thunderbird migrates from myspell to hunspell
>    (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=319778) and
>    autodetects available dictionaries
> d) something or other is done to sanity-ify the vim usage of the
> hunspell dictionaries to use them directly to avoid the rather baroque
> procedure of the vim spell README (?)
> e) someone else maintains the various hunspell per-language dictionaries
> as separate rpms :-)
> f) migrate other stuff from aspell to hunspell ? Add some aspell
> compatibility stuff to hunspell to be a drop in replacement for aspell ?
> Keep aspell, tweak it to handle hunspell dictionaries ? Ignore that the
> hunspell dictionaries are just extended aspell dictionaries, and keep
> the parallel set of aspell format dictionaries and aspell.
>
> C.
>

If there is one OSS application type that I believe doesn't need many
choices of is a dictionary. There can't possibly be that many ways to
implement a dictionary in the first place. A good dictionary which can
handle different backends and with a clear API that different
languages can patch into would be nice. Having three dictionaries in
one distro seems a bit much IMHO.

...of course I am in no position to fix this yet.

-- 
Fedora Core 5 and proud