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 is also a library however the recommend way to use aspell is through the Pspell library as the actual interface to the aspell library is constantly changing.

1.1 Comparison to other spell checker engines

	Aspell	Ispell	Netscape 4.0	Microsoft Word 97
Open Source	x	x
Suggestion Intelligence	88-98	54	55-70?	71
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://aspell.sourceforge.net/test for more info and how you can help contribute to the test kernel. The current scores for aspell are 88 in fast mode, 93 in normal mode, and 98 in bad spellers mode see section 5.4.4 for more information about the various suggestion modes.

If you have any other information you would like to add to this chart please contact me at kevina at users sourceforge net.

1.1.1 Comparison to Ispell

1.1.1.1 Features that only Aspell has

• Does a much better job with coming up with suggestions than Ispell does or for that matter any other spell checker I have seen. If you know a spell checker that does a better job please let me know.
• 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 the list against the dictionary on disk in case another process modified it.
• Can share the memory used in the main word list between processes.
• 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.
• Better support for run-together words.

1.1.1.2 Things that only Aspell will have real soon

• Ability to use multiple dictionaries by simply specifying it on the command line or in the configuration files.

1.1.1.3 Things that, currently, only Ispell have

• Lower memory footprint
• Support for affix compression
• Perhaps better support for spell checking (La)TEX files.
• Support for spell checking Nroff files.