Friedel en ander frappanthede

I saw on a few places people writing about OSX 10.6 (Snow Leopard) that now (additionally) uses Hunspell for the system wide spell checker. If it is the truth, Apple is hiding it very well — a search for "Hunspell" on their web site barely returns anything. But it is interesting to see that OSX is using Hunspell, and that OSX has a system wide spell checker based on Hunspell before GNOME does.

A few people have successfully installed Hunspell dictionaries in OSX 10.6. This web site with spell checkers for Sami has the best summary. A system wide spell checker combined with language recognition is really cool. It is a pitty that such useful language technology is not yet all that common in the world of Free Software. Programs that I know of that use language recognition, include OpenOffice.org and Virtaal.

It sounds as if the internationalisation of these features on OSX still has some room for improvement — only a few three letter codes are supported at the moment, and only one spell checking language for all documents in one program is possible at the moment. I have seen few programs that really make it easy and pleasant to work in a variety of languages. If I understand it correctly, that means only one language at a time for all tabs in Safari, for example.

In the world of Free Software we have something better than mere Hunspell — Enchant. Will GNOME 3.0 be able to have an integrated spell service based on Enchant?