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Spell checking for other languages!

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Spell checking for other languages!
Why the spell checking don't use a more sophisticated method that will permit its usage for other languages?
I know there are programs for spell checking for unix (for windows too I think) that will do this and also make suggestion too. With an auto updated thesaurus and so on....
Please consider that
Max
The one with Mac OS X Server 10.4 :)
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Re: [maxpico] Spell checking for other languages! In reply to
I'll look at some possible solutions for the 2.0.0 release. The problem is that it is very difficult to base a spellcheck without some pragmatic word sounding algorithm (for english, SOUNDEX). You can catch typos easily (e.g.
"personla" vs. "personal"), but catching genuine spelling mistakes where people try to find a word that sounds the same (e.g. "pursanul" vs. "personal") becomes very difficult, because although the words sound sound similar, the spellings are quite different. We actually use a combination of the sound and the similarity - first we find words that "sound" the same, then sort those by assigning a score to each based on how similar the two words are.

So, the problem is that in other languages, letters don't necessarily "sound" the same as they do in english - and thus the effectiveness of soundex is greatly reduced. We can't sort just by the similarity, because it takes much too much time to do so for every word in the dictionary.

But I will definitely look at a possible solution for this, because it has been requested many times by many different people and would be an excellent feature to offer for non-english Gossamer Forum users. The other problem is in handling the various Asian languages, which, as far as I know, cannot really be "spellchecked." (But please correct me if I am wrong here).

Jason Rhinelander
Gossamer Threads
jason@gossamer-threads.com
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Re: [Jagerman] Spell checking for other languages! In reply to
Well I know that there are some server utilities that can do this job very well.. It will just be easy to use this utilities without implementing too much code in gforum...
Max
The one with Mac OS X Server 10.4 :)
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Re: [maxpico] Spell checking for other languages! In reply to
That's an interesting idea that I hadn't really thought of - I'll certainly add it to the considerations for this 2.0 bug.

Jason Rhinelander
Gossamer Threads
jason@gossamer-threads.com