From: Andrew Dunbar (hippietrail@yahoo.com)
Date: Wed Oct 30 2002 - 20:40:21 EST
--- F J Franklin <F.J.Franklin@sheffield.ac.uk>
wrote:
> > Martin Sevior wrote:
> > > I've been thinking about this. This issue is
> > > pretty common on IRC. Now that we have code to
> > > automatically download spell files, could we go
> > > one step further and upload apsell files to
> > > sourceforge and make downloader clever enough to
> > > know if it should download an aspell or ispell
> > > hash?
Well it wouldn't need much cleverness. If it's an
ispell build it should download ispell hashes and if
it's a pspell build it should download pspell
dictionaries.
> I seem to have missed this post, but anyway.
>
> AbiWord only supplies it's own hashes because
> ispell's hashes are so disgustingly platform-
> dependent and because pspell wasn't ported to
> Windows - I don't know if the latter is still true
> of GNU aspell.
It's worse than that. Ispell was designed in such a
way that the user builds both the ispell program and
the ispell dictionaries using the same settings on the
same machine. The program then loads the exact C
structure off disk. The structure can vary in many
ways including endian, number of bits/flags, maximum
word length, and worst of all, platform or compiler
dependent struct field padding. The fact we can offer
hashes by download at all is mostly due to the fact
that almost everybody uses the same hardware these
days.
> Dictionaries are best left to distributors, and some
> distributions (NetBSD does, or did) patches its
> AbiWord to use system ispell hashes.
I disagree. This is fine for major European languages
but I'd be surprised if all the distributors even
shipped the Irish dictionaries which exist for both
ispell and pspell. For exotic languages, spelling is
much more closely related to the word processor than
to the OS in general. Especially in cases where Abi
supports a language which the OS does not.
Think Latin, Esperanto, Lojban, Irish, Welsh, and
Marshallese.
> Ideally AbiWord should cope with arbitrary hashes -
> wasn't hippietrail working on that recently?
I had a hash sniffer which could detect endian, the
types used in the arrays, all of the user-definable
settings, and the C struct padding for all the sample
hashes I had access to. I didn't get that code into
the ispell loader yet though and now I've had to put
my computer into storage because I'm staying at a
backpackers again. When I have a computer setup again
I'll resume work on this plus proper support for
user dictionary suggestions which was removed at some
point and later replaced by a poorer algorithm.
> The abispell package causes much confusion. I would
> hate to cause even more by adding pspell to the mix.
We'd do better by removing the confusion than by not
supporting some configurations in my opinion. I
really want Abi to be able to use ispell and psell
simultaneously since the same languages are not
supported by both.
> Anyone know - does GNU aspell compile on QNX &
> Windows these days?
Last I heard it was due to a problem with libtool on
Windows. Even if we did have pspell on all platforms
I much prefer ispell. I find it more intuitive and
less patchy. Pspell is cool but it tends to go way
overboard with its suggestions for what I need.
Andrew Dunbar.
> Curious, Frank
>
> Francis James Franklin
> F.J.Franklin@shef.ac.uk
>
> `Medium atomic weights are available: Gold, Lead,
> Copper, Jet, Diamond,
> Radium, Sapphire, Silver and Steel.
> `Sapphire and Steel have been assigned...'
>
=====
http://linguaphile.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/translator.pl http://www.abisource.com
__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Everything you'll ever need on one web page
from News and Sport to Email and Music Charts
http://uk.my.yahoo.com
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.4 : Wed Oct 30 2002 - 20:48:58 EST