About Hunspell
--------------

Hunspell is a spell checker and morphological analyzer library and program
designed for languages with rich morphology and complex word compounding or
character encoding. Hunspell interfaces: Ispell-like terminal interface
using Curses library, Ispell pipe interface, OpenOffice.org UNO module.

Hunspell's code base comes from the OpenOffice.org MySpell
(http://lingucomponent.openoffice.org/MySpell-3.zip). See README.MYSPELL,
AUTHORS.MYSPELL and license.myspell files.
Hunspell is designed to eventually replace Myspell in OpenOffice.org.

Main features of Hunspell spell checker and morphological analyzer:

- Unicode support (affix rules work only with the first 65535 Unicode characters)

- Morphological analysis (in custom item and arrangement style) and stemming

- Max. 65535 affix classes and twofold affix stripping (for agglutinative
  languages, like Azeri, Basque, Estonian, Finnish, Hungarian, Turkish, etc.)

- Support complex compoundings (for example, Hungarian and German)

- Support language specific features (for example, special casing of
  Azeri and Turkish dotted i, or German sharp s)

- Handle conditional affixes, circumfixes, fogemorphemes,
  forbidden words, pseudoroots and homonyms.

- Free software (LGPL, GPL, MPL tri-license)

Compiling on Unix/Linux
-----------------------

./configure
make
make install

For dictionary development, use the --with-warnings option of configure.

For interactive user interface of Hunspell executable, use the --with-ui option.

The developer packages you need to compile Hunspell's interface:

glibc-devel

optional developer packages:

ncurses (need for --with-ui), eg. libncursesw5 for UTF-8
readline (for fancy input line editing,
  configure parameter: --with-readline)
locale and gettext (but you can also use the
  --with-included-gettext configure parameter)

Hunspell distribution uses new Autoconf (2.59) and Automake (1.9).

Compiling on Windows
--------------------

1. Compiling with Windows SDK

Download the free Windows SDK of Microsoft, open a command prompt
window and cd into hunspell/src/win_api. Use the following command
to compile hunspell:

vcbuild

2. Compiling in Cygwin environment

Download and install Cygwin environment for Windows with the following
extra packages:

make
gcc-g++ development package
mingw development package (for cygwin.dll free native Windows compilation)
ncurses, readline (for user interface)
iconv (character conversion)

2.1. Cygwin1.dll dependent compiling

Open a Cygwin shell, cd into the hunspell root directory:

./configure
make
make install

For dictionary development, use the --with-warnings option of configure.

For interactive user interface of Hunspell executable, use the --with-ui option.

readline configure parameter: --with-readline (for fancy input line editing)

1.2. Cygwin1.dll free compiling

Open a Cygwin shell, cd into the hunspell/src/win_api and

make -f Makefile.cygwin

Testing
-------

Testing Hunspell (see tests in tests/ subdirectory):

make check

or with Valgrind debugger:

make check
VALGRIND=[Valgrind_tool] make check

For example:

make check
VALGRIND=memcheck make check

Documentation
-------------

features and dictionary format:
man 5 hunspell

man hunspell
hunspell -h
http://hunspell.sourceforge.net

Usage
-----

The src/tools dictionary contains ten executables after compiling
(or some of them are in the src/win_api):

affixcompress: dictionary generation from large (millions of words) vocabularies
  analyze: example of spell checking, stemming and morphological analysis
  chmorph: example of automatic morphological generation and conversion
  example: example of spell checking and suggestion
 hunspell: main program for spell checking and others (see manual)
   hunzip: decompressor of hzip format
     hzip: compressor of hzip format
makealias: alias compression (Hunspell only, not back compatible with MySpell)
    munch: dictionary generation from vocabularies (it needs an affix file, too).
  unmunch: list all recognized words of a MySpell dictionary
wordforms: word generation (Hunspell version of unmunch)

After compiling and installing (see INSTALL) you can
run the Hunspell spell checker (compiled with user interface)
with a Hunspell or Myspell dictionary:

hunspell -d en_US text.txt

or without interface:

hunspell
hunspell -d en_UK -l <text.txt

Dictionaries consist of an affix and dictionary file, see tests/
or http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Dictionaries.

Using Hunspell library with GCC
-------------------------------

Including in your program:
#include <hunspell.hxx>

Linking with Hunspell static library:
g++ -lhunspell example.cxx

Dictionaries
------------

Myspell & Hunspell dictionaries:
http://extensions.libreoffice.org
http://cgit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice/dictionaries
http://extensions.openoffice.org
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Dictionaries

Aspell dictionaries (need some conversion):
ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/aspell/dict
Conversion steps: see relevant feature request at http://hunspell.sf.net.

László Németh
nemeth at numbertext org

MySpell is a simple spell checker that uses affix
compression and is modelled after the spell checker
ispell.

MySpell was written to explore how affix compression
can be implemented.

The Main features of MySpell are:

1. written in C++ to make it easier to interface with
   Pspell, OpenOffice, AbiWord, etc

2. it is stateless, uses no static variables and
   should be completely reentrant with almost no
   ifdefs

3. it tries to be as compatible with ispell to
   the extent it can.  It can read slightly modified
   versions of munched ispell dictionaries (and it
   comes with a munched english wordlist borrowed from
   Kevin Atkinson's excellent Aspell.

4. it uses a heavily modified aff file format that
   can be derived from ispell aff files but uses
   the iso-8859-X character sets only

5. it is simple with *lots* of comments that
   describes how the affixes are stored
   and tested for (based on the approach used by
   ispell).

6. it supports improved suggestions with replacement
   tables and ngram-scoring based mechanisms in addition
   to the main suggestion mechanisms

7. like ispell it has a BSD license (and  no
   advertising clause)

But ... it has *no* support for adding words
to a personal dictionary, *no* support for converting
between various text encodings, and *no* command line
interface (it is purely meant to be a library).

It can not (in any way) replace all of the functionality
of ispell or aspell/pspell.  It is meant as a learning
tool for understanding affix compression and for
being used by front ends like OpenOffice, Abiword, etc.

MySpell has been tested under Linux and Solaris
and has the world's simplest Makefile and no
configure support.

It does come with a simple example program that
spell checks some words and returns suggestions.

To build a static library and an example
program under Linux simply type:

tar -zxvf myspell.tar.gz
cd myspell2
make

To run the example program:
./example ./en_US.aff ./en_US.dic checkme.lst

Please play around with it and let me know
what you think.

Please see the file CONTRIBUTORS for more info.