Making Aspell a CORBA Component

[Kevin Atkinson <kevinatk home com>]

For those of you who don't know Aspell is a spell checker that does a
much better job than Ispell at coming up with suggestions.

Anyway, I was wondering what you would think of Making Aspell a COBRA
component that other applications gnome applications can use.

Here is a run down of Aspell features as compared to Ispell.

Features that only Aspell has
  
     * Does a much better job with coming up with suggestions than
Ispell
       does.
     * Can learn from users misspellings.
     * Is an actual library that others programs can link to instead of
       having to use it through a pipe.
     * Is multiprocess intelligent. When a personal dictionary (or
       replacement list) is saved it will now first update he list
       against the dictionary on disk in case another process modified
       it.
       
Things that only Aspell will have real soon
  
     * Support for detachable dictionaries so that more than one aspell
       class can use the same dictionary.
     * Support for multiple personal dictionaries as well as support for
       special auxiliary dictionaries.

Things that, currently, only Ispell have
  
     * Lower memory footprint
     * Support for affix compression
     * Support for spell checking Latex and Nroff files.
 
Of particular interest here is Aspell's support for detachable
dictionaries which will allow multipliable programs to use the same
dictionary and thus save memory.  

Having Aspell as a CORBA component will also hide the fact that it is a
C++ program thus other programs of all languages can use it with out any
difficulty.

If you think it is a good idea I will look into developing an interface.

Thanks,
Kevin
-- 
Kevin Atkinson
kevinatk@home.com
http://metalab.unc.edu/kevina/