Friedel en ander frappanthede

I recently learnt that Google Chrome can also check spelling in text areas. It made me think back on how things changed in this area in the past few years.

If I remember correctly, I switched to Konqueror in ancient days since it was the only browser that could do this for me at that stage. I spent a lot of time at Wikipedia and needed an Afrikaans spell checker. This was also the time that I got really interested in spell checkers and I became more involved at Translate.org.za.

At some stage it became possible to also use the SpellBound extension in the then new Firefox to check spelling, and since version 2, Firefox could do it itself if I remember correctly. It is interesting to see that SpellBound is still available for people who want to check a lot of text at a time.

Apparently Opera can use Aspell, but it doesn't work on my computer, and I have heard that people struggle with it. Aspell also doesn't provide advanced technology that many languages need, and these days, most languages use Hunspell.

Of course on Mac OSX there is the system wide spell service that all programs can use. This is the way things should work, and as I understand, this is also the case in KDE4. This is definitely on my wish list for GNOME 3. At least Gtkspell already moved to Enchant which makes it possible to use Hunspell and other spell checking systems. For those who want to use Hunspell as the spell checker on OSX, have a look at OpenXSpell. This project holds a lot of promise.

It was interesting to see that Google's browser Chrome can also check spelling, and that it uses Hunspell directly. You can read their instructions and ask for the inclusion of any missing dictionaries (currently they don't package all the available dictionaries). Ain Vagula says his request was answered in a few days. Olivier R added that there is a limitation, although this hopefully doesn't affect too many languages.

It was also interesting to see that they store it in their own format, apparently for faster loading. Maybe OpenOffice.org and Firefox can also benefit from something like this?