Re: Which spell checkers to include by default?

[Petter Reinholdtsen <pere@hungry.com>]

[Luca Capello]
> It seems that I cannot find a comparison of the differences spell
> checkers.  Please, could you enlighten me on why hunspell should be
> a better default one?

I can only refer to the knowledge I have gotten from those I know that
work on spell checkers.  The features of spell checkers is normally
how well they handle word transformations, concatenations and
proposals.  ispell, aspell and myspell are ok for languages where the
main transformation is adding word endings (like cat -> cats), and not
good with languages with more complex transformations (er -> var), and
completely useless for languages with very complex transformations
(got no example, but I know Nothern Sami have word transformations
based on the words around changes.  When it comes to concatenations, I
am not sure which of these are doing a good job, but I believe aspell,
myspell and hunspell does a better job than ispell.  As for proposals,
aspell include rules on common misspellings and letters that sound the
same as other letters, and uses this to calculate likely proposals for
misspelled words.  ispell do not.  I believe myspell and hunspell does
the same.

So the main differentiating factor is how well the spell checker
handle word transformation, and I am told that hunspell is a huge
improvement for languages with complex transformation rules compared
to ispell, aspell and myspell.

I found
<URL:http://www.divvun.no/doc/proof/spelling/X-spell/index.html> on
the pages for the Nothern Sami spell check, which provide some more
information.

Happy hacking,
-- 
Petter Reinholdtsen