Spell Checking in KDE4 (KSpell2)

[Mashrab Kuvatov]

Hi all,

though I'm not a KDE developer, but a KDE user who wishes a success to
the project, I'd like to say a few words on this issue.

Even at the moment, from the user's point of view KSpell2 is a very nice
lib, IMHO. Why? Take KSpell2 plus ASpell-0.60+, there is no need of manually
setting the encoding. All "conversation" with libaspell done in UTF-8, since
starting with 0.60 it supports UTF-8 naturally. So, encoding item from
Settings->Spellchecker has gone (usability +10). If we imagine that by default
KSpell2 uses ASpell, there is no need of setting a backend. So, spellchecking
settings, or more likely language settings, will consist of one list to choose
the language from (usability +10). Look at AbiWord, for example.

So, why ASpell? What about other *Spell? I fail to see a sense of going to
tomorrow with a spellchecker which still uses 8-bit encoding. If we are
talking about NG technologies, I do not understand at all. A note about
HSpell, according to its homepage, those guys make ASpell dictionary every new
release. BTW, I'm using Mandriva Linux 10.2, it comes with 74 ASpell-0.60 and
44 MySpell dictionaries. A number of ASpell dictionaries will raise, I know 
many i18n teams are working on them. Mdk dropped ISpell long ago, nothing
happened people still use Mdk.

I know Enchant is cool, Dom and Co made a great lib. Great thing about it is
that no manual setting for backend and encoding is needed, just set the
language and it will try to find the best backend available. No worries about 
encoding as well, it uses UTF-8. To my knowledge (correct me if I'm wrong)
it is used in AbiWord, the others are using GtkSpell (e.g. Evo) or GnomeSpell.
I know there are patches for all that, but not all of GNOME is using Enchant
like it is the case with KSpell in KDE.

If KDE uses Enchant the spellchecking will look like
app->kspell->enchant->[a-z]spell
if KDE uses KSpell2 it will look like
app->kspell2->[a-z]spell
So, obviously, it is preferable to go with kspell2. I'm skipping the 
advantages of having a lib in KDE CVS, it is also obvious.

IMHO, if one puts the same amount of care and love into improving KSpell2 as
one has to put into adjusting Enchant for KDE's need, KSpell2 will rock as
much as Enchant does.

Finally, I'd like to encourage the devs to improve, at least try, KSpell2
for KDE4. Like Heiko Evermann said, it is the best time for that. I'm sure
there always will be people to help. Heiko Evermann has shown his interest,
I'm also a little bit of help (do not expect much from my limited abilities).

Cheers,
Mashrab.
-- 
Mashrab Kuvatov
Ph.D student
University of Bremen, IUP
Home-page: www.sat.uni-bremen.de/members/mashrab
PGP key: www.uni-bremen.de/~kmashrab/kmashrab.asc
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