Exorcising KSpell

[Zack Rusin]

On Monday 02 February 2004 03:15, Thomas Zander wrote:
> I'd like to have a good spell-checker in KOffice, and if you can't
> replace the kdelibs version then I'm pretty sure the change in
> KOffice will not offend anyone.

Well, I'll continue maintaing KSpell only for the 3.2.x series. After 
that I'll leaving it, since like I said it's simply unmaintainable at 
this point. So the options for kdelibs right now are : kspell2 and no 
spell checking at all.

> While we are on the topic of spell-checking.  The algorithm to
> present the user with alternatives for his wrongly-spelled word; has
> that been rewritten as well?
> I really hate how it does such a bad job, and some algorithms I came
> across the other day would probably do a better job.

In general kspell/kospell just return a list of words that ispell/aspell 
returned to them. The biggest problem I found a few times in different 
places was the fact that people were sorting the results by accident 
(e.g. when putting them in a list view they were doing new 
QListViewItem( m_listView, *suggestionsIterator ) with a default 
sorting list view, so the results seemed to be all messed up). Also 
aspell in general returns a lot more reliable results than ispell, but 
it's lacking in the dictionary area. KSpell2 uses aspell-devel library, 
but provides its own ispell implementation (largely shared with 
enchant). It should return results a little better than ispell binary 
using the same dics, but it's not a difference that will shock people 
all around the world. 

Zack

-- 
I intend to live forever, so far so good.