[aspell-user] Re: asynchronous spell checking

[Kevin Atkinson]

On Wed, 23 Jan 2002, Daniel Naber wrote:

> some time ago you were asked on the mailing list if you are planning to add
> asynchronous spell cecking capabilities to pspell. The idea is that this
> might be necessary for "online spellchecking", i.e. check-as-you-type. In
> this case, it's not acceptable to wait for the spell checker to return
> after you type a word, even if it's only 0.1 seconds. Asynchronous would
> mean that the checker *immediately* returns, so that the application
> doesn't block. When the checker is finished it would return some "signal"
> as a result.

I *really* don't think there is a need for asynchronous spell checking.
For one thing in order for it to even make sense the spell checker would
need to me on a separate thread.  Furthermore, if the spell checker is on
a separate thread it would probably be far simpler to simple have that
thread handle the spell checking of the document in the background rather
than having the spell checker thread "signal" the main thread which will
then do something with the information.

> What do you think? Has anybody successfully developed online spellchecking
> with pspell? (I only tested pspell + ispell, BTW)

Could you be more specific?

>
> Trying to work with KDE's kspell API I noticed how broken it is. It still
> uses the old pipe approach instead of pspell (but the pipe approach can be
> done asynchronously!). I wonder if it makes sense to reimplement it using
> pspell.

When you are using a pipe you are having the same effect of a separate
thread...

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