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Aspell is an Open Source spell checker designed to eventually replace
Ispell. Its main feature is that it does a much better job of coming
up with possible suggestions than Ispell does. In fact recent tests
shows that it even does better than Microsoft Word 97's spell checker
in some cases. In addition it has both compile time and run time support
for other non-English languages. Aspell is also a library however
the recommend way to use aspell is through the Pspell library as the
actual interface to the aspell library is constantly changing.
| |
Aspell |
Ispell |
Netscape 4.0 |
Microsoft Word 97 |
| Open Source |
x |
x |
|
|
| Suggestion Intelligence |
88-98 |
54 |
55-70? |
71 |
| Personal part of Suggestions |
x |
x |
x |
|
| Alternate Dictionaries |
x |
x |
? |
? |
| International Support |
x |
x |
? |
? |
The suggestion Intelligence is based on a small test kernel of misspelled/correct
word pairs. Go to http://aspell.sourceforge.net/test for more
info and how you can help contribute to the test kernel. The current
scores for aspell are 88 in fast mode, 93 in normal
mode, and 98 in bad spellers mode see section 5.4.5
for more information about the various suggestion modes.
If you have any other information you would like to add to this chart
please contact me at kevina at users sourceforge net.
- Does a much better job with coming up with suggestions than Ispell
does or for that matter any other spell checker I have seen. If you
know a spell checker that does a better job please let me know.
- Can learn from users misspellings.
- Is an actual library that others programs can link to instead of having
to use it through a pipe.
- Is multiprocess intelligent. When a personal dictionary (or replacement
list) is saved it will now first update the list against the dictionary
on disk in case another process modified it.
- Can share the memory used in the main word list between processes.
- Support for detachable dictionaries so that more than one
aspell class can use the same dictionary.
- Support for multiple personal dictionaries as well as support for
special auxiliary dictionaries.
- Better support for run-together words.
- Ability to use multiple dictionaries by simply specifying it on the
command line or in the configuration files.
- Lower memory footprint
- Support for affix compression
- Perhaps better support for spell checking (La)TEX files.
- Support for spell checking Nroff files.
Next: 2. Getting Started
Up: Aspell .33.6.1 alpha A
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Kevin Atkinson
2001-05-29