I have always felt that the spell checking engine and grammar checking engine should have just been an open API in Windows1. During the desktop suite feature war of the 1990s, when I worked on the Lotus suite in Japan, every new version of Word (and the other suite applications) brought more and more sophisticated spell checking and grammar checking. That has now stagnated and while Word has great spell checking, Internet Explorer and other basic applications do not. Moreover, many other applications come with their own spellchecker built in which means that you have to enter those words which are unique to you in multiple applications supplementary dictionaries.
In the past, I downloaded a spell checker for Explorer and it was so useful that I used Explorer for all those tasks that required significant text entry. Today as I randomly browsed the Opera documentation2 I found that it supported GNU Aspell, so I downloaded and installed it. When I fired up Opera, nothing changed! The spell checker was still greyed out. I checked the Aspell documentation and found that I didn't have any dictionaries installed3by default. Going back to the Aspell home page and scrolling a little further down the page gave me the dictionary downloads section. With an appropriate dictionary in place, Opera's "check spelling" option became active and I can now use it on every multi-line text input box. sigh...
Why did the restrict it to multi-line controls? Don't subjects and titles need spell checking too??
1: Maybe it is! But why don't more apps use it?
2: I really should read more product documentation.
3. Ahem. This is in the Aspell documentation.
Oops...I used W.Bloggar to post the first version of this and forgot to spell check. As a result it was full of errors...
Posted by stuartcw at June 29, 2004 05:25 AMHello, i hear your pain, and actually we are working on such a system for "Turkish" Language. Turkish is very very hard in terms of spell checking, but it is now already working with %95 success.This is very easy for english like languages, except the preparation of dictionary. However, my main goal is not to make it a library, a real "Grammar\Language server" it will b working just like a DB server working on sockets with multiple client capabilities. . For java users, probably there will be a client api (like jdbc), for others, a kind of messaging mechanism.
The challenging part however, the format of input and output. easier way is to force clients to send word arrays for input for spell checking, but this requires quite a client job. Otherwise formatting output can be a big problem. we are stil thinking about the best way.. Although being in 0.1 version hopefully we will continue nicely.
https://tspell.dev.java.net/
Posted by: aaa at June 29, 2004 10:43 PM