Re: [Aspell-user] Re: Feedback on our approach to Arabic

[Lars Aronsson]

Ethan Bradford wrote:

> I don't see having archaic words as a particular problem.  It 
> only reduces quality when a user misspells into one.

The words in the dictionary are not only allowed in the text, but 
also used as suggestions. Suppose your English dictionary contains 
both OLD and OLDE (which is an older spelling of OLD). When the 
user by mistake happens to write OLED, the software could suggest 
"perhaps you mean OLDE?" which will be quite confusing to the 
user.

I scan and OCR a lot of old books in Danish and Swedish, and have 
to build my own dictionaries of old spellings to support OCR.  I 
also maintain my own personal aspell dictionary.  But I do this in 
two pieces.  My main dictionary is for current spellings, and then 
I have a small add-on dictionary that only contains the old forms. 
For OCR I use both, but with Aspell I only use the main 
dictionary.

Every language needs a good dictionary (or two).  But then a 
spell-checker also needs a good way to find the right suggestion.  
This is the real strength of Aspell, at least for English.


-- 
  Lars Aronsson (address@hidden)
  Project Runeberg - free Nordic literature - http://runeberg.org/