[aspell-devel] Suggestions for correct words, etc.

[Devdutt Marathe]

Hi all,

I need to receive alternate spellings not only for words not in the dictionary, but also for words that are present in the dictionary. This would be used, for example, to interface with a search engine and offer suggestions for even correctly spelt words based on number of hits received for the alternative spellings. What's the easiest way to do this?

I am also thinking of writing some code to set up aspell as an apache httpd dynamic shared object which can be accessed over an http api. Is there a related effort going on somewhere in the community? In this regard, is it safe to use mod_prefork? What about thread-safety? Do I need to "synchronize" around calls to the Aspell API? If so, one alternative I can think of is to maintain a pool of Aspell objects at the server and use one that is free (somewhat like DB connection pooling). Any comments?

Lastly, what is the behavior of aspell in the following scenario: I am accessing aspell (say correcting a very large file in pipe mode), and while I am doing this, I delete the current dictionary, phonetic map, etc., and replace them with a new dictionary and phonetic map. Will this cause the current call to aspell to crash? When will the new dictionary be loaded?

Best wishes,
Devdutt