1. Introduction

Aspell is an Open Source spell checker designed to eventually replace Ispell. Its main feature is that it does a much better job of coming up with possible suggestions than Ispell does. In fact recent tests shows that it even does better than Microsoft Word 97's spell checker in some cases. In addition it has both compile time and run time support for other non English languages. Aspell also doubles as a powerful C++ library with C and Perl interfaces in the works.

1.1 Comparison to other spell checker engines

	Aspell	Ispell	Netscape 4.0	Microsoft Word 97
Open Source	x	x
Suggestion Intelligence	9	5	7?	8
Personal part of Suggestions	x	x	x
Alternate Dictionaries	x	x	?	?
International Support	x	x	?	?

The suggestion Intelligence is based on a small test kernel of misspelled/correct word pairs. Go to http://metalab.unc.edu/kevina/aspell/test for more info and how you can help contribute to the test kernel. A ? in the suggestion intelligence means that it is a guess based on personal experience.

If you have any other information you would like to add to this chart please contact me at kevinatk@home.com.

1.1.1 Comparision to Ispell

1.1.1.1 Features that only Aspell has

• Does a much better job with coming up with suggestions than Ispell does.
• Can learn from users misspellings.
• Is an actual library that others programs can link to instead of having to use it through a pipe.
• Is multiprocess intelligent. When a personal dictionary (or replacement list) is saved it will now first update he list against the dictionary on disk in case another process modified it.
• Support for detachable dictionaries so that more than one aspell class can use the same dictionary.
• Support for multiple personal dictionaries as well as support for special auxiliarydictionaries.

1.1.1.2 Things that only Aspell will have real soon

1.1.1.3 Things that, currently, only Ispell have

• Lower memory footprint
• Support for affix compression
• Support for spell checking Latex and Nroff files.