Re: Please focus on one generic spell checker in Debian (Was: Bug#487732: O: ispell -- International Ispell (an interactive spelling corrector))
* Hendrik Sattler <debian@hendrik-sattler.de> [080629 18:15]:
> Am Mittwoch, 25. Juni 2008 21:53:24 schrieb Agustin Martin:
> > Each spellchecker has currently some special features. Fortunately, the
> > only thing where ispell is stronger than the other spellcheckers (support
> > for pseudocharsets like 'a, "a, \'a, ... ) is already included in aspell
> > development version, so at that time we can drop ispell without any loss
> > of features. Not sure about hunspell here.
>
> What tools are using such pseudo characters, probably because they do not
> support 8bit character sets? Can't they be fixed to do so?
> AFAIK, even latex knows the existence of the 8th bit, nowadays.
Just because some tool support 8bit characters, that does not mean that
using 8 bit characters is good. Especially for latex
1) Choosing encoding issues:
Just when almost anyone used latin1 or some bastardisation of that
everyone thought it might be safe now to use that, then utf-8 came.
2) Compatibility:
there are many old things around still to be used. When modifying some
document changing all special characters just to spell check them is not
nice. Also when combining many files, having different 8bit encodings is
a larger pain.
3) Stability
There is still suprisingly many things that can break with 8bit
characters. Many of the elementary protocols (like smtp) just do not
support it. So one danger more that the additional encoding/decoding
will fail somewhere.
4) Easy of use:
When using German umlauts on an keyboard without them, using 8 bit
characters means having one more keypress (the Multi_Key) for every
umlaut (as the multi-key sequences (at least those I can remember)
are usually multi-key + babel encoding, guess why).
Hochachtungsvoll,
Bernhard R. Link
--
"Never contain programs so few bugs, as when no debugging tools are available!"
Niklaus Wirth
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