Subsections
   
  * 1.1 Comparison to other spell checker engines
      + 1.1.1 Comparison to Ispell
          o 1.1.1.1 Features that only Aspell has
          o 1.1.1.2 Things that only Aspell will have real soon
          o 1.1.1.3 Things that, currently, only Ispell have

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

1. Introduction

Aspell is an Open Source spell checker designed to eventually replace
Ispell. Its main feature is that it does a much better job of coming up
with possible suggestions than Ispell does. In fact recent tests shows
that it even does better than Microsoft Word 97's spell checker in some
cases. In addition it has both compile time and run time support for other
non-English languages. Aspell is also a library however the recommend way
to use aspell is through the Pspell library as the actual interface to the
aspell library is constantly changing.

1.1 Comparison to other spell checker engines



+------------------------+--------+--------+------------+----------------+
|                        | Aspell | Ispell |  Netscape  | Microsoft Word |
|                        |        |        |    4.0     |       97       |
+------------------------+--------+--------+------------+----------------+
|            Open Source | x      |   x    |            |                |
+------------------------+--------+--------+------------+----------------+
|             Suggestion | 88-98  |   54   |   55-70?   |       71       |
|           Intelligence |        |        |            |                |
+------------------------+--------+--------+------------+----------------+
|       Personal part of | x      |   x    |     x      |                |
|            Suggestions |        |        |            |                |
+------------------------+--------+--------+------------+----------------+
| Alternate Dictionaries | x      |   x    |     ?      |       ?        |
+------------------------+--------+--------+------------+----------------+
|  International Support | x      |   x    |     ?      |       ?        |
+------------------------+--------+--------+------------+----------------+




The suggestion Intelligence is based on a small test kernel of misspelled/
correct word pairs. Go to http://aspell.sourceforge.net/test for more info
and how you can help contribute to the test kernel. The current scores for
aspell are 88 in fast mode, 93 in normal mode, and 98 in bad spellers mode
see section 5.4.4 for more information about the various suggestion modes.

If you have any other information you would like to add to this chart
please contact me at kevina at users sourceforge net.

1.1.1 Comparison to Ispell

1.1.1.1 Features that only Aspell has

  * Does a much better job with coming up with suggestions than Ispell
    does or for that matter any other spell checker I have seen. If you
    know a spell checker that does a better job please let me know.
  * 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 the list against
    the dictionary on disk in case another process modified it.
  * Can share the memory used in the main word list between processes.
  * 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 auxiliarydictionaries.
  * Better support for run-together words.

1.1.1.2 Things that only Aspell will have real soon

  * Ability to use multiple dictionaries by simply specifying it on the
    command line or in the configuration files.

1.1.1.3 Things that, currently, only Ispell have

  * Lower memory footprint
  * Support for affix compression
  * Perhaps better support for spell checking (La)TEX files.
  * Support for spell checking Nroff files.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

