Spell Checking in KDE4 (KSpell2)

[heiko.evermann at gmx.de]

Hi Zack, hi everyone,

after reading some code from kspell.cpp, I am a bit astonished. 
The code looks as if over several years several people put their hacks in. 

The most astonishing point is that the spell checker is called over the 
command line and the response will be parsed. This of course leads to some 
problems. So that for aspell-0.6 and multibyte encodings we get a further 
layer of hacks on top of that.

I am now definitely sure that KSpell needs to be cleaned up for KDE 4: 
We will certainly have further changes over time in the spell checkers and 
maintaining KSpell is no option. KSpell2 might be one, but still it would 
require one plugin for each spell checker backend. hspell is still missing 
and would have to be programmed. So enchant would be an option as we would 
get all the plugins that we need for free.

My original problem was a lot different: I wanted words that are unknown to be 
rendered in red even when the spell checker has no suggestions, but only 
knows that the word is wrong. All the code is so complicated that I would 
have to spend hours just to find where to twist KSpell. 

I would vote for a cut and for a clean new start. So far KSpell has done a 
great job in KDE, but I think it is at the end of maintainabily right now.

Kind regards,

Heiko Evermann