On Monday 01 October 2007, Mathias Bauer wrote: > So are you planning to ask for replacing hunspell as OOo spell checker > by your new spell checker?
No, our plan is to continue doing what we already do: ship openoffice.org-voikko as an extension that provides spell checker and hyphenator (+ hopefully grammar checker in the future) for Finnish. The underlying linguistic software we use (malaga) is unnecessarily low-level tool for most languages. Developing dictionaries with it is generally much harder than with hunspell. But we need some of the additional power that comes with it to handle the very peculiar word compounding rules for Finnish. I am not sure if any of the languages that currently use Hunspell would benefit from this. Other reason is that I am the only person in our development team who has signed the OOo JCA. And there are many contributors. So there is practically no chance of getting the code integrated to upstream OOo. > > This software is already recognising over 99 % of words in typical > > Finnish text and is starting to slowly replace the previous non-free > > spell checking alternative for OOo. It is shipped in some Linux distros > > too, at least in Debian, Ubuntu, and Mandriva. > > What "non-free" spell checking alternative are you talking about? Sorry, > but I don't know the Finnish OOo version. The non-free (binary only but freely redistributable) alternative is called Soikko. (So to be clear: the non-free extension is called Soikko and our free one Voikko. Only the first letters differ.) Soikko has been available since about 2002. At the time of its release it was perhaps the best Finnish spell checker, many people claimed it to be better than the spell checker in MS Word. While it is not part of the Finnish OOo version (it cannot be as it is non-free), practically every Finnish user of OOo used to install it. There were no other options. The best myspell/hunspell dictionary there is recognises only about 80-90 % of words in typical Finnish documents, but users of MS Word (and WordPerfect too) have since late 1990's got used to spell checkers that have about 99 % recognition ratios. We did non like it, but this piece of non-free code was something we had to live with. I even ported Soikko to use the extension infrastructure of OOo 2.0. But Soikko (the actual spell checker) has been unmaintained for about five years now, and our free Voikko has now reached its level in terms of quality. The hyphenator it offers is already better. Hopefully I managed to clarify things a bit :-) Harri --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
