MySpell

MySpell is the spell checker that comes with OOo Writer of the free OpenOffice.org office suite.

= Background =

MySpell was started by Kevin Hendricks to integrate various open source spelling checkers into the OpenOffice.org build. With a little prodding from Kevin Atkinson, the author of Pspell, a new spelling checker (MySpell) was written in C plus plus that supported affix compression, based on Ispell. This code has been given to Pspell and will eventually make it into a future Pspell release after it has been integrated.

=Locale (language) Files=

Every locale (language for a specific territory) can have files for spelling, hyphenation and for a thesaurus. These files will be all found together in one folder. The spell checking is done using the .aff file for the locale together with the .dic file. The .dic file is a list of words along with a group of letters which refer to the affixes found in the .aff file. This saves space because instead of having include all forms of a word, like jump (jumping, jumps, jumped), the .dic file will include the word once and the references to the affixes in the .aff file allow the construction of all the other forms.

It is not enough to copy the files for a locale into the folder. As there are a huge number of locales this would be a considerable overhead so only those locales listed in dictionary.lst are accessible. dictionary.lst can be edited with a simple text editor but front ends provide a more user friendly way of adding new locales.

=MySpell in Open Office=

To change the language in OOo Writer you have to go to format - character and there there is an option to change the dictionary for spellchecking.

=See also=

*Aspell *Ispell *Pspell

=External links=

*[http://packages.debian.org/src:myspell Debian -- myspell] *[http://ruminations.willemvandenende.com/rublog/rublog.cgi/SysAdmin/OpenOfficeSpellCheck.rdoc Checking OpenOffice documents for correct spelling in your mothers tongue]