aspell is kicking my ass. I thought it would be nice, you know, to use this GNU gadget instead of any of the $200 OCXes and whatnot. (Considering that a choice would assume I have the $200 to spend on that.) First I thought it was too good to be true and it was GPLed, which doesn't work in my case (plugin for software that isn't mine, when the FSF considers specific plugins "linking"), but it's actually LGPLed. Hurrah!
Except it does wacky shit like, when run from d:\work\code\mumble\spell, think it should look for dictionaries in d:\work\code\mumble\s. What? There's not even a directory there! Oh, until I make one, or set the directory it should look in correctly, at which point the program abnormally exits. What?! Is it even acceptable on UNIXes to exit(3) on error (if that's what it's doing)?
Don't get me started on the documentation. Do not.
In the end the only thing keeping me from making my own is that I don't know how I would generate suggestions, and even ignoring that, there's a lot more work than finding words in a list (compression, keeping metadata for the suggestion algorithm, term stemming). So tomorrow it's back again for more punishment.
