spell checking
The first step was to see what spell-related packages I have installed on my system. After a lot of searching around (too much free time, I guess), I found that aptitude search ‘~ispell’ does the same as aptitude search spell, but shows you only the installed packages… So, I dicovered I have all of them installed: aspell (pidgin, gedit), myspell (Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice until v2.0.2), hunspell (OpenOffice, Firefox and Thunderbird until v3.0) and the enchant wrapper.
Now, spell checking works fine in OpenOffice, Firefox, Thunderbird and Gedit (for all 3 languages installed: greek, english and italian), but not in Pidgin; I only get english spell checking. According to the pidgin wiki, it is gtkspell‘s fault, because it does not yet allow language switching (latest version 27/05/2005!)…
And I wonder: why can they make it work at the gedit team and not pidgin?
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Azitech 
So, hunspell started from myspell and it’s an openoffice.org project. Firefox switched from myspell to hunspell as of 3.0, and (it seems) also Thunderbird will switch in v3.0. Opera will also switch from myspell to hunspell in v10.0
So aspell is left only for gedit and pidgin/empathy… It’s fast (see benchmarks) but it sucks…
azimout
03/06/2009 at 15:24