Spellcheckers
These are an important part of creating a complete language specific view of
the operating system. Even English speakers prefer to see correct spell
checkers for their locale. Certain languages by their nature do not need or
cannot use the wordlist type spellcheckers found on Linux.
There are 3 main spellcheckers in Linux:
* Ispell
* Aspell
* MySpell
Ispell is the original and includes affix compression. Aspell is dubbed as a
replacement for Ispell and has better algorithms for quessing missing words.
MySpell is used by OpenOffice.org and Mozilla and will work on both Windows and
Linux, it uses the affix compression found in Ispell.
Web based corpus building
Or finding new words in my language by scanning the web. You can make use of
corpusbuilder and text_cat (How to use these TODO)
Once you have a list of potential words you can use the new-words script in
src/wordlist to identify words that are not in your language. Review these
words and add them to you master wordlist.
Letter Frequencies
The translate project has a simple python script that creates letter frequncies
that can be used in the MySpell TRY line.
See translate/src/wordlist/letter-frequency.py
Building
The easiest way to build your spellcheckers is to use our project spellchecker
build framework. This will build MySpell and Aspell (Ispell temporarily disabled)
spellcherckers from a common wordlist or wordlists. Look at the Afrikaans and
Zulu dictionaries for a template of the process.
Making it work
Make sure that your language is included in:
http://cvs.gnome.org/viewcvs/gnome-spell/gnome-spell/dictionary.c
So that Gnome applications such as Evolution can make use of your aspell
spellchecker.
Publishing
* OpenOffice.org
To get the spellchecker onto the OpenOffice.org pages and thus downloadable
from within OpenOffice.org. You will need to submit a bug report. Here is and
example issue:
http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=23201
* ASpell
TODO
* Mozilla
TODO: have tried requesting updates on the Mozilla dictionary site but no
responce.
References
Debian Spellchecker packaging policies
http://dict-common.alioth.debian.org/dsdt-policy.txt
OpenOffice.org Lingucomponent