MySpell is a simple spell checker that uses affix compression and is modelled after the spell checker ispell. MySpell was written to explore how affix compression can be implemented. The Main features of MySpell are: 1. written in C++ to make it easier to interface with Pspell, OpenOffice, AbiWord, etc 2. it is stateless, uses no static variables and should be completely reentrant with almost no ifdefs 3. it tries to be as compatible with ispell to the extent it can. It can read slightly modified versions of munched ispell dictionaries (and it comes with a munched english wordlist borrowed from Kevin Atkinson's excellent Aspell. 4. it uses a heavily modified aff file format that can be derived from ispell aff files but uses the iso-8859-X character sets only 5. it is simple with *lots* of comments that describes how the affixes are stored and tested for (based on the approach used by ispell). 6. like ispell it has a BSD license (and no advertising clause) But ... it has *no* support for adding words to a personal dictionary, *no* support for converting between various text encodings, and *no* command line interface (it is purely meant to be a library). It can not (in any way) replace all of the functionality of ispell or aspell/pspell. It is meant as a learning tool for understanding affix compression and for being used by front ends like OpenOffice, Abiword, etc. MySpell has been tested under Linux and Solaris and has the world's simplest Makefile and no configure support. It does come with a simple example program that spell checks some words and returns suggestions. To build a static library and an example program under Linux simply type: tar -zxvf myspell.tar.gz cd myspell make To run the example program: ./example ./en_US.aff ./en_US.dic checkme.lst Please play around with it and let me know what you think. Developer Credits: Special credit and thanks go to ispell's creator Geoff Kuenning. Ispell affix compression code was used as the basis for the affix code used in MySpell. Specifically Geoff's use of a conds[] array that makes it easy to check if the conditions required for a particular affix are present was very ingenious! Kudos to Geoff. Very nicely done. BTW: ispell is available under a BSD style license from Geoff Kuennings ispell website: http://www.cs.ucla.edu/ficus-members/geoff/ispell.html The Original MySpell code was written by Kevin Hendricks and released under a BSD license. An almost complete rewrite of MySpell for use by the Mozilla project has been developed by David Einstein (Deinst@world.std.com). David and I are now working on parallel development tracks to help our respective projects (Mozilla and OpenOffice.org and we will maintain full affix file and dictionary file compatibility and work on merging our versions of MySpell back into a single tree. David has been a significant help in improving MySpell. Special thanks also go to La'szlo' Ne'meth <nemethl@gyorsposta.hu> who is the author of the Hungarian dictionary and who developed and contributed the code to support compound words in MySpell and fixed numerous problems with the encoding case conversion tables. Thanks, Kevin Hendricks kevin.hendricks@sympatico.ca