Re: Fly-spelling with multiple dictionaries

[martin rudalics]

> Does any of the packages (yours, Peter's) define a clear API to
> integrate other spell-checkers than Ispell/Aspell?

Ispell/Aspell are, to my knowledge, the only spell-checkers providing
the piping mechanism Emacs uses - Hunspell has a C(++) interface only.
Currently, all we do is send some buffer text to the spell-checker and
wait what the spell-checker tells us about that text.

> The OS may offer spell-checking facilities, and it would make for
> better integration (and also better spell-checking in my case) if that
> was supported.

IIRC integrating spell-checking wasn't that trivial with Open Office and
Thunderbird either - especially when using some European languages like
German.

> Also note that modern text services go beyond spell-checking: grammar
> checking, if done right, can be very helpful, too.  If there was a
> clear API, people could create the necessary components to integrate
> such services.

Grammar checking can (and should, IMHO) be done separately from
spell-checking.  Neither Aspell nor Ispell provide any support for this.

> Such an API should allow the service to spell-check more than one word
> at a time,

That's what I do with speck, I send one line of text to the
spell-checker at a time.  I don't want to send more since this might
interfere with typing.

> and it should define text filtering hooks so we don't pass
> each \begin{itemize} to the spell-checker when in latex-mode.

Currently, Aspell and Ispell know better what should be ignored in LaTeX
buffers.  Why duplicate work in this area?

> [If
> there is such an API already, can you please point me to its
> documentation?]

I'm not aware of such an API.