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Aspell and Hunspell: A Tale of Two Spell Checkers
Thread poster: Hans Lenting
Hans Lenting
Hans Lenting
Netherlands
Member (2006)
German to Dutch
Jan 22, 2022

Today I found this very interesting article: Aspell and Hunspell: A Tale of Two Spell Checkers

https://battlepenguin.com/tech/aspell-and-hunspell-a-tale-of-two-spell-checkers/

The article is from 2016. And Aspell is even older. Since I'm using Hunspell in several apps and even my operating system uses it, I decided to check how my ... See more
Today I found this very interesting article: Aspell and Hunspell: A Tale of Two Spell Checkers

https://battlepenguin.com/tech/aspell-and-hunspell-a-tale-of-two-spell-checkers/

The article is from 2016. And Aspell is even older. Since I'm using Hunspell in several apps and even my operating system uses it, I decided to check how my recent version of Hunspell handles the example words from the article:


excersized
enterperuner
presuing


In CafeTran Espresso I got the following suggestions from Hunspell

1

2

3

Not one correct suggestion ... I found this quite amazing. Since I haven't installed Aspell (yet), I cannot verify the results for this older spell checker.

It would be interested to read your findings and opinion on this topic. ▲ Collapse
 
Hans Lenting
Hans Lenting
Netherlands
Member (2006)
German to Dutch
TOPIC STARTER
Aspell Jan 23, 2022

Testing Aspell with:


excersized
enterperuner
presuing


1

Quite impressive ...


[Edited at 2022-01-23 10:00 GMT]
 
Samuel Murray
Samuel Murray  Identity Verified
Netherlands
Local time: 04:38
Member (2006)
English to Afrikaans
+ ...
Try... Jan 23, 2022

Try testing it with words where the misspelled part is at the start of the word.

Hans Lenting
 
Samuel Murray
Samuel Murray  Identity Verified
Netherlands
Local time: 04:38
Member (2006)
English to Afrikaans
+ ...
OmegaT, Hunspell Jan 23, 2022

Firstly, to make matters fairer, you need to tell us the version number listed in the AFF file. I tested OmegaT using "David Bartlett, Andrew Brown, R 1.20, 30/11/06" for en-GB. Ideally, one also has to indicate whether the app uses the vanilla version of Hunspell and which version it uses, but I realise that this information isn't always accessible.

On to OmegaT on Windows 10:

omegat hunspell 1

omegat hunspell 2

omegat hunspell 3

That said, I don't really use spell-checkers as "spelling checkers" myself. I use them as typo checkers. In other words, when a word is flagged, I usually already know how to spell it correctly, so I don't need the spell-checker to teach me. I just need the spell-checker to identify a potential typing error, and then I manually correct it.

In cases where I truly don't know how to spell the word, it's often faster to just try various different options manually and see when the squiggly lines disappear (this may be because of the extra effort involved in activating the interactive spell-checker).

Added: many years ago, before OmegaT offered spell-checking, I had an AutoIt script that used Aspell to spell-check in OmegaT, but even then, I found it easier to just list the unrecognized words, as opposed to suggesting possible corrections:

aspellspell


[Edited at 2022-01-23 12:42 GMT]
 
Samuel Murray
Samuel Murray  Identity Verified
Netherlands
Local time: 04:38
Member (2006)
English to Afrikaans
+ ...
Aspell 5 on Windows 10 Jan 23, 2022

Here is what I get with Aspell 0.50.3.3 on Windows 10.

aspell 1

aspell 2

aspell 3

I could not get Aspell 6 to work on my Windows 10. It kept saying that it is unable to open the dictionary files. But then, I'm not sure that the English dictionary files on the Aspell web site are correct, since they're only 180 KB large, for all English variants in total (whereas the Afrikaans dictionary files are 250 KB large, and Afrikaans is a much smaller language).

One nice thing about Hunspell vs Aspell is that the dictionary files are a lot simpler to gather and install. For Afrikaans, the dictionary folder has 11 files. For English (version 6), the dictionary folder has 98 files. Compare that to Hunspell: 2 files. What's more, the Hunspell dictionary file is a plain text file, whereas Aspell's dictionary files are binary files that need to be compiled with a special program each time you update them.

Added: Unfortunately my version of Ispell for Windows (which I downloaded over a decade ago) can't run on a 64-bit system.

[Edited at 2022-01-23 12:54 GMT]
 
Hans Lenting
Hans Lenting
Netherlands
Member (2006)
German to Dutch
TOPIC STARTER
Scores are very much alike Jan 24, 2022

Samuel Murray wrote:

Try testing it with words where the misspelled part is at the start of the word.


I found this one, where Aspell performed better:

Screen Shot 2022-01-23 at 13.23.34

Screen Shot 2022-01-23 at 13.23.46
 
Hans Lenting
Hans Lenting
Netherlands
Member (2006)
German to Dutch
TOPIC STARTER
Some more examples Jan 24, 2022

Hunspell vs. Aspell:

Screen Shot 2022-01-24 at 08.29.09

Screen Shot 2022-01-24 at 08.29.21

Screen Shot 2022-01-24 at 08.30.59

Screen Shot 2022-01-24 at 08.31.08
 
Hans Lenting
Hans Lenting
Netherlands
Member (2006)
German to Dutch
TOPIC STARTER
Check via web Jan 24, 2022

Samuel Murray wrote:

In cases where I truly don't know how to spell the word, it's often faster to just try various different options manually and see when the squiggly lines disappear (this may be because of the extra effort involved in activating the interactive spell-checker).


Aren't there any web resources for correct spelling of Afrikaans? For Dutch we have:


https://woordenlijst.org/#/?q=onmidelijk


And:

Screen Shot 2022-01-24 at 08.41.51

About the 'extra effort': it's very easy to create an AutoHotkey macro to query the web resources.


[Edited at 2022-01-24 07:46 GMT]
 
Samuel Murray
Samuel Murray  Identity Verified
Netherlands
Local time: 04:38
Member (2006)
English to Afrikaans
+ ...
@German Jan 24, 2022

German-Dutch Engineering Translation wrote:
Samuel Murray wrote:
...this may be because of the extra effort involved in activating the interactive spell-checker.

Aren't there any web resources for correct spelling of Afrikaans?
...
About the 'extra effort': it's very easy to create an AutoHotkey macro to query the web resources.

What I meant by "extra effort" is having to take my hand off the keyboard, grab the mouse, and right-click on the word, in order to see a list of suggestions. It's faster to correct a typo by just pressing the backspace key on the keyboard and retyping a new attempt at the word.

Hans Lenting
 
Hans Lenting
Hans Lenting
Netherlands
Member (2006)
German to Dutch
TOPIC STARTER
Even simpler Jan 24, 2022

Samuel Murray wrote:

What I meant by "extra effort" is having to take my hand off the keyboard, grab the mouse, and right-click on the word, in order to see a list of suggestions. It's faster to correct a typo by just pressing the backspace key on the keyboard and retyping a new attempt at the word.


CafeTran let’s you cycle through suggestions by pressing CTRL+Space:

1



[Edited at 2022-01-25 08:50 GMT]
 


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Aspell and Hunspell: A Tale of Two Spell Checkers






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