1 Introduction
GNU Aspell is a spell checker designed to eventually replace Ispell.
It can either be used as a library or as an independent spell checker.
Its main feature is that it does a much better job of coming up with
possible suggestions than just about any other spell checker out there
for the English language, including Ispell and Microsoft Word. It
also has many other technical enhancements over Ispell such as using
shared memory for dictionaries and intelligently handling personal
dictionaries when more than one Aspell process is open at once.
The latest version of Aspell can always be found at http://aspell.net
1.1 Comparison to other spell checker engines
| Aspell | Ispell | Netscape | Microsoft
|
| | | 4.0 | Word 97
|
Open Source | x | x
|
Suggestion | 88-98 | 54 | 55-70? | 71
|
Intelligence
|
Personal part | x | x | x
|
of 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.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: for more
information about the various suggestion modes Notes on the Different Suggestion Modes.
If you have any other information you would like to add to this chart
please contact me at kevina@gnu.org.
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 other 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 auxiliary dictionaries.
- Better support for run-together words.
- Ability to use multiple dictionaries by simply specifying it on the
command line or in the configuration files.
- A better, more complete word list for the English language. Word
lists are provided for American, British, and Canadian spelling.
Special care has been taken to only include one spelling for each word
in any particular word list. The word list included in Ispell by
contrast only included support for American and British and also tends
to included multiple spellings for a word which can mask some spelling
errors.
1.1.1.2 Things that, currently, only Ispell has
- Lower memory footprint
- Perhaps better support for spell checking (La)TeX files.
- Support for spell checking Nroff files.