Free man script

GNU Aspell 0.60.5 is designed as a Free and Open Source spell checker for eventually replacing Ispell. It can either be used as a library or as an independent spell checker. Its main feature is that it does a superior job of suggesting possible replacements for a misspelled word than just about any other spell checker out there for the English language.

Unlike Ispell, Aspell can also easily check documents in UTF-8 without having to use a special dictionary. Aspell will also do its best to respect the current locale setting. Other advantages over Ispell include support for using multiple dictionaries at once and intelligently handling personal dictionaries when more than one Aspell process is open at once.

Major Features:

1. Be able to accept words with spaces in them as many languages have words, such as a word in a foreign phrase, which only make sense when followed by other words. See Words With Symbols in Them.
2. Reorganize manual to make it easier to understand and to make it possible to break out useful man pages.
3. Support soundslike lookup with affix compression. I think it is possible, although I don't know how effective it will be. The basic idea is to affix compress the soundslike codes and then match the codes up with affix compressed words. If you are interested, email aspell-devel@gnu.org, and I will explain it in more detail.
4. Use Lawrence Philips' new Double Metaphone algorithm. The main task involved here is converting the algorithm into table form. This will take some time but their is no real programming experience is required. If you want to help with Aspell but don't have any real programming experience, this would be a great place to start.
5. Rank suggestions based on frequency information. Both global frequency and document specific frequency can be used. The latter will require that the whole document be made available to the spell checker. Also use frequency information to flag words which are found in the dictionary but not in common usage, and thus might not be what was intended.
6. Support a "dual-script" mode where Aspell can use a separate dictionary depending on which script it detects the current word in, the two dictionaries can have nothing in common, ie an English one and a Russian one for example. This will not support two languages that use the same script as that is a lot more complicated. For example if the word is misspelled which dictionary should it use for the suggestions?
7. Write a GUI for the aspell utility. Ideally it should be able to do everything the Aspell utility can do and not just be able spell check a document.
8. Develop a more powerfull C API for Aspell. Ideally this API should allow one to perform all the tasks the Aspell utility can do. This included the ability to check whole documents, and create dictionaries, among other things.
9. Create a C++ interface for Aspell, possibly on top of the C one.
10. Support more than one spell checker engine. The basic support is there, but since there has only every been one spell checker engine, it will probably take a decent amount of work.