(OLD) (ARCHIVED) Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

[Michalis]

What is Enchant?

On the surface, Enchant appears to be a generic spell checking library. You can request dictionaries from it, ask if a word is correctly spelled, get corrections for a misspelled word, etc...

Looking closer, you'll see the Enchant is more-or-less a fancy wrapper around the dlopen() system call. Enchant steps in to provide uniformity and conformity on top of these libraries, and implement certain features that may be lacking in any individual provider library. Everything should "just work" for any and every definition of "just working."



Enchant is capable of having multiple backends loaded at once. Currently, Enchant has 8 backends:
* Aspell/Pspell (intends to replace Ispell)
* Ispell (old as sin, could be interpreted as a defacto standard)
* MySpell/Hunspell (an OOo project, also used by Mozilla)
* Uspell (primarily Yiddish, Hebrew, and Eastern European languages - hosted in AbiWord's CVS under the module "uspell")
* Hspell (Hebrew)
* Zemberek (Turkish)
* Voikko (Finnish)
* AppleSpell (Mac OSX)

I've built 2 packages, one containing everything and one small containing only the necessary in order Ayttm to work.