[aspell] Aspell in LyX

[Asger Alstrup Nielsen]

Hi!

I just read about Aspell on freshmeat, and figured this is a great 
project.
I'm a member of the LyX development team, and I would like to use a 
different spell checker than ispell.  It seems Aspell fits the job!

So, the question is:  How should this be done?

I browsed the documentation you have on the web-site, and saw that you 
already implemented a ispell -a compatibility mode, so it should be 
possible to use this.

However, that solution is not optional.  I rould rather see that Aspell is 
provided as a library which the LyX code can link against, and then use the 
Aspell API to get the job done.  That would ensure maximum speed and 
flexibility.

Can Aspell be compiled to a library already, or are there any plans to do 
this?  Do you have other ideas for how to do this?

At the moment, the LyX team is working in two branches:  Finalizing of LyX 
v1.0, and doing a lot of work on the development series 1.1.  In the 1.1 
series, we have adopted the STL, and use it a lot.  So this fits right in 
with the approach in Aspell.

If LyX would come with Aspell support, and we could boast that it is much 
better than the Microsoft Word spellchecker, the result would be to the 
benefit of both Aspell and LyX.  However, in order to do so, Aspell has to 
support more languages than English.

So regarding word lists for other languages than English - check out this 
site:

http://www.win-uk.net/~hyphen/wordlist.html

At the bottom, there is a link to an ftp-site where word-lists for many, 
many languages are available:

ftp://ftp.ox.ac.uk/pub/wordlists/

It seems they are in the public domain, and thus they should be available 
for use in Aspell without problems.

I suppose it is possible to write a small program that takes a file and 
produces an alphabet from it.  Given that, it should be relatively easy to 
generate the language definition files Aspell needs..

I've downloaded Aspell and will try to get it running with the Danish 
dictionary when I have time.

Greets,

Asger Alstrup

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