GNU Aspell 0.60-pre1 Now Available

[Kevin Atkinson]

The first official pre-release of GNU Aspell 0.60 is now available at:
  ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/aspell/aspell-0.60-pre1.tar.gz

You will also need to download at least one dictionary. Dictionaries 
designed specifically for version 0.60 can be found at
  ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/aspell/dict
However, dictionaries packages for Aspell 0.50 can generally also be used 
so if you don't find the one you are looking for there also try
  ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/aspell/dict

As always more info on Aspell itself can be found at http://aspell.net

Changes from 0.50.5 to 0.60:

   * Added support for Affix Compression.  Affix compression stores the
     root word and then a list of prefixes and suffixes that the word
     can take, and thus saves a lot of space.  The codebase comes from
     MySpell found in OpenOffice.  It uses the same affix file that
     OpenOffice (and Mozilla) use.

   * Added support for accepting all input and printing all output in
     UTF-8 or some other encoding different from the one Aspell uses.
     This includes support for Unicode normalization.  Aspell can now
     support any language with no more than 210 distinct characters,
     including different capitalizations and accents, _even if_ there
     is not an existing 8-bit encoding that supports the language.

   * Added support for loadable filters and customizable filter modes
     thanks to Christoph Hintermüller.

   * Enhanced SGML filter to also support skipping sgml tags such as
     "script" blocks thanks to Tom Snyder.

   * Added gettext support thanks to Sergey Poznyakoff

   * Reworked the compiled dictionary format.  Compiled dictionaries
     now take up less space (less than 80% for the English language) and
     creating them is significantly faster (over 4 times for the
     English language).

   * Reworked suggestion code.  It is significantly faster when dealing
     with short words (up to 10 times).  Also added support for MySpell
     Replacement Tables and n-gram lookup.  In addition, added basic
     support for compound words.

   * Manual has has been converted to texinfo format thanks to the work
     of Chris Martin.

   * Reworked the build system so that a single Makefile is used for
     most of the code.

   * Lots of other minor changes due to another massive overhaul of the
     source code.

I plan on creating another pre-release in about two weeks, or, if they're 
not any major problems, an official release.

Please test this out throughly.  I am particularly interested in if it works 
OK with other applications that use Aspell as a library such as PHP.  It 
should be binary compatible with Aspell 0.50, but this has not been very 
well tested.

If you are a translator please work on updating the Aspell translation 
in time for the official release of Aspell 0.60.  The strings should be 
stable now.

If you are reasonable for packaging Aspell please work on creating a 
binary package for Aspell 0.60 and let me know if you run into problems.  
Aspell 0.60 should be stable enough now so that it can replace Aspell 
0.50.

This pre-release contains a number of portability fixed when compared to 
the 20040703 snapshot as well as a few minor bug fixes.

-- 
http://kevin.atkinson.dhs.org