From kevin@atkinson.dhs.org Sun Sep 22 23:40:14 2002 Date: Sun, 22 Sep 2002 15:35:15 -0400 (EDT) From: Kevin Atkinson Reply-To: aspell-devel@gnu.org To: aspell-announce@gnu.org, aspell-devel@gnu.org Subject: Aspell Status as of Sep 22 Aspell 0.50.2 should be out with in a couple of weeks. A good number of bugs have been fixed. However, I am still trying to track down a bug with ispell.el. If you are interested in the most stable version of Aspell you can use the "rel_0_50-branch" of the CVS version of Aspell. A decent deal of work has been done toward Aspell 0.51 in the past month: * Aspell now has gettext support thanks to Sergey Poznyakoff. Current the only locale supported is "es". Now would be a good time to consider adding gettext support for your language. * Rudimentary Loadable filter support has been added thanks to Sergey Poznyakoff. Christoph Hintermüller is working with me to improve it. * I reworked the way soundslike lookups are handles typo-analysis is used. This cut the suggestion time in most cases anywhere from 1/2 to 1/4 and in some cases even better. It also reduces the size of the compiled Aspell dictionary by roughly 20%. All of these changes can be found in the latest CVS version of Aspell. If there is enough interest I will create a snapshot to make trying it out easier. Also: * I am on the verge of adding affix support to Aspell. Furthermore, I have figured out a way to support both soundslike lookup and affix compression at the same time. Something, which I previously didn't think was possible. * Lutz Horn has converted roughly half of the Aspell manual to texinfo format. I am not sure if he is going to have time to finish the task. So, if anyone is interested in picking up where he left off please let me know. There are still a decent number of jobs that remain to be done. So if you are interested in helping me with one of these tasks please email me at kevina@gnu.org. Good C++ skills are needed for most of these tasks involving coding. I am also still looking for someone to eventually take over the maintenance and development of Aspell. If you are interested please contact me directly. * Clean up copyright notices and bring the Aspell package up to GNU Standards. * Allow Aspell to check documents which are in UTF-8. The main thing to be done is to get Aspell to display UTF-8 correctly. This will involve being able to get the length of UTF-8 strings and display UTF-8 using the curses library. * Make Aspell Thread safe. Even though Aspell itself is not multi-threaded I would like it to be thread safe so that it can be used by multi-threaded programs. There are several areas of Aspell that that are potently thread unsafe (such as accessing a global pool) and several several classes which have the potential of being used by more than one thread (such as the personal dictionary). * Create a C++ interface for Aspell on top of the C interface. * Enhance ispell.el so that it will work better with the new Aspell. Kevin Atkinson, The sole Aspell maintainer -- http://kevin.atkinson.dhs.org