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GNU Aspell is a spell checker designed to eventually replace Ispell.
It can either be used as a library or as an independent spell checker.
Its main feature is that it does a much better job of coming up with
possible suggestions than just about any other spell checker out there
for the English language, including Ispell and Microsoft Word. It
also has many other technical enhancements over Ispell such as using
shared memory for dictionaries and intelligently handling personal
dictionaries when more than one Aspell process is open at once.
|
Aspell |
Ispell |
Netscape 4.0 |
Microsoft Word 97 |
Open Source |
x |
x |
|
|
Suggestion Intelligence |
88-98 |
54 |
55-70? |
71 |
Personal part of Suggestions |
x |
x |
x |
|
Alternate Dictionaries |
x |
x |
? |
? |
International Support |
x |
x |
? |
? |
The suggestion Intelligence is based on a small test kernel of misspelled/correct
word pairs. Go to http://aspell.net/test for more info and
how you can help contribute to the test kernel. The current scores
for Aspell are 88 in fast mode, 93 in normal mode,
and 98 in bad spellers mode see section 4.4.4
for more information about the various suggestion modes.
If you have any other information you would like to add to this chart
please contact me at kevina@gnu.org.
- Does a much better job with coming up with suggestions than Ispell
does or for that matter any other spell checker I have seen. If you
know a spell checker that does a better job please let me know.
- Can learn from users misspellings.
- Is an actual library that others programs can link to instead of having
to use it through a pipe.
- Is multiprocess intelligent. When a personal dictionary (or replacement
list) is saved it will now first update the list against the dictionary
on disk in case another process modified it.
- Can share the memory used in the main word list between processes.
- Support for detachable dictionaries so that more than one
aspell class can use the same dictionary.
- Support for multiple personal dictionaries as well as support for
special auxiliary dictionaries.
- Better support for run-together words.
- Ability to use multiple dictionaries by simply specifying it on the
command line or in the configuration files.
- A better, more complete word list for the English language. Word lists
are provided for American, British, and Canadian spelling. Special
care has been taken to only include one spelling for each word in
any particular word list. The word list included in Ispell by contrast
only included support for American and British and also tends to included
multiple spellings for a word which can mask some spelling errors.
- Support for affix compression (However this will change with Aspell
0.51)
- Lower memory footprint
- Perhaps better support for spell checking (La)TEX files.
- Support for spell checking Nroff files.
Next: 2. Getting Started
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Kevin Atkinson
2004-02-10