Abiword Spell

[James Alan Brown]

Dear Henric , Copy to AbiWord-Dev for any interested parties,

I am writing this email to you with the hope that you can provide me with any helpful information regarding AbiWord�s spell checking via ispell�s hash dictionaries.

My gut feeling is that without a full international spell checking facility AbiWord will be a dead duck in the water!  And I know all of us don�t want that to happen!

The main problem:

Trying to use any ispell pre-built or hashbuild dictionary for the UK fails with �Magic 2 errors got 0x35�!  In fact I can see quite clearly why that is due to the following:-

The default american.hash file seems to be 30% smaller in size that the correct american.hash ispell build from americanmed+ (small) indicating to me that it has been changed for some reason or built in a different way! (any info on this)?

AbiWords /spell/ispell.h has been changed probably many times now for various reasons and it seems the reading of ispell�s hash table headers has been disabled completely and been assigned fix integer values for MASKSIZE, MASKTYPE and FLAGFIELD and parts of the de-encoding disabled in order to run this small american.hash dictionary as the default.

These present default settings will not allow users to use Ispell dictionaries med+ (small) or xlg (large) full stop!

Please note that for UK English  (unless you know differently) we can only seem to get dictionaries of ispell british.med+ or british.xlg that build fine and work fine in programs outside of AbiWord.  I suspect that the others who have this problem that it is for that reason also. 

So unless we redo the ispell.h a newMain.c and put back in the correct ispell Mask header testing we are all stuck with an American spell check.

All this relates to AbiWord + Linux OS and I am unable to confirm if Windows 95/98 and other OS platforms are affected so if any one can tell me that it would be most helpful)

I am quite prepared to work at putting this part of AbiWord right and to give as much of my free time as possible but it would be most helpful if you or anyone else can enlighten me as to what changes or info you have.

Long term it would be nice to maybe look hard at Pspell and maybe use it but short term I am trying to provide an easy fix that will enable us all to use the spell check in our own languages now.

I would like to help or even take over, if need be,  sorting out the many problems within the AbiWord Spell Checking modual.

It would  be handy if any one could list if their spell check works in their language or only the American default and on what OS platform.


Regards,
James
JAB Computers Bristol UK

http://www.jabcomp.force9.co.uk/