[aspell-devel] API enhancements

[Andrew Dunbar]

I'm a developer of AbiWord which uses either ispell or
Aspell for spellchecking, depending on what is
available on the machine building AbiWord.

I recently reworked AbiWord's Aspell support so that
it now works on Windows as well as on Linux and I'm
now adding/enhancing features to our spelling support.

One such feature is to display an icon next to each
language in our language dialog to indicate the level
of spelling support for that language.

Ideally we want to know "language is supported but not
installed", "language is supported and installed", and
"language is not supported at all".

To achieve this efficiently, we need to be able to ask
Aspell which languages it supports, this means an
enumeration API to return all supported language tags:
en, de, fr or en-US, en-GB, en-AU etc.

We also need an API which will tell us whether a given
language is installed or not. Currently we can just
try
to open each dictionary but we would prefer a less
expensive API which does not have to initialize an
entire spelling engine which is only going to be
destructed again.

Comment and feedback appreciated.

Andrew Dunbar.


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http://linguaphile.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/translator.pl 
http://www.abisource.com

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