Date: Sat, 3 Jul 2004 15:10:13 -0400 (EDT)
From: Kevin Atkinson
Subject: New Aspell Snapshot and Language Package

A new Aspell snapshot is now available: 
  ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/aspell/aspell-0.60-20040703.tar.gz

Changes from Aspell 0.60-20040628:

  * Added support for spell checking documents that are different
    from the current locale encoding.

  * Manual updates.

  * Bug fixes.

Changes from Aspell 0.60-20040608:

  * Added "usage" help mode and made normal --help more verbose.  This 
    includes listing all available filters, even if they don't have any 
    options.  Also lists available dicts.

  * Reworked config class so that options settings the config files
    are handled correctly.  This involved a rewrite of have the
    config code.  Also changed "rem-all-" to "clear-" and added
    support for other prefixes.

  * Fixed Stack overflow bug in word-list-compress

  * Added HTML filter.  Uses the same library as SGML filter but has 
    different defaults.  SGML filter now has the empty list as the
    default for its two options.

  * Changes in filter code:
    * Renamed *-filter.opt to *-filter.info
    * Filter modules are now named *-filter instead of lib*-filter.
    * Renamed "filter-" prefix to "f-".

  * Bug fixes.

A 0.60-20040624 snapshot was also released but it was never announced.

Other Major Changes From Aspell 0.50.5:

   * Merged in Christoph Hintermüller changes from loadable-branch.  
     Which, among other things, added support for user defined filter
     modes.

   * Added support for checking affix flags when creating dictionaries.  
     Because of this some exiting dictionaries will produce a lot
     of warnings about invalid or inapplicable affixes.

   * Added "dict-alias" option for creating dictionary alias.

   * Changed "jargon" option to "variety" which is now a list so that
     multiple varieties can be specified.  The "jargon" option is still
     supported for backwards compatibility.

  * Reworked the suggestion code so that:

    * It is now possible to use soundslike lookup with affix compression 
      by only storing the soundslike of the root word.
 
    * It is significantly faster when dealing with short words.
  
    * Supports n-gram lookup.

    * Provides basic support for suggesting misspellings for
      compound words.

  * Removed support for stripping accents.  Because of this 
    THE ASPELL 0.50 ENGLISH DICTIONARY PACKAGE WILL NO LONGER WORK.  YOU 
    NEED TO DOWNLOAD A NEW ONE FROM  
    ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/aspell/dict/en/

  * Rewritten SGML filter thanks to Tom Snyder.  It now supports
    skipping SGML tags such as "script".

  * Unicode Normalization is now supported as described in 
    http://aspell.net/devel-doc/man/Unicode-Normalization.html

  * Language names can now include a '_' so that the country
    code may be included when it is appropriate.

  * The format and name of the character set data file changed.
    The extension changed from .dat to .cset.  The format and name
    should be stable now.

  * I decided to name the next Aspell version 0.60 since almost every 
    part of Aspell has been refactored or rewritten to some extent.

  * Dictionaries and data files are now installed in LIBDIR/aspell-0.60 
    so that Aspell 0.50 and 0.60 can more peacefully coexist.

  * Added support for accepting all input and printing all output in
    UTF-8 or some other encoding different from the one Aspell uses.
    Aspell can now support any language that no more than 210 distinct
    characters, including different capitalizations and accents, _even
    if_ there is not an existing 8-bit encoding that supports the
    language.

  * Support for Affix Compression.  Affix compression stores the root
    word and then a list of prefixes and suffixes that the word can
    take, and thus saves a lot of space.  The codebase comes from
    MySpell found in OpenOffice.  It uses the same affix file
    OpenOffice (and Mozilla) use.

  * Manual has has been converted to texinfo format thanks to the work
    of Chris Martin.

  * Reworked the build system so that a single Makefile is used for
    most of the code.

  * Added support for loadable filters thanks to Christoph Hintermüller

  * Added gettext support thanks to Sergey Poznyakoff


I expect to release Aspell 0.60 by the end of July.  This is the last 
snapshot before I create an official pre-release.

If you are a translator please work on updating the Aspell translation.  
The strings should be stable now.


A new Aspell Language package is also available at:
  ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/aspell/aspell-lang-20040703.tar.bz2

This one creates a better README file and adds the options "doc-encoding" 
and "alt-encoding" to allow documentation to be generated in a encoding 
other than UTF-8.

-- 
http://kevin.atkinson.dhs.org