Date: Wed, 17 Mar 2004 22:45:18 -0500 (EST)
From: Kevin Atkinson <kevina@gnu.org>
Subject: New Aspell Snapshot: 0.60-20040317

I have just released another pre Aspell 0.60 snapshot, version
0.60-20040317.  This snapshot has several important changes

1) I decided to name the next Aspell version 0.60 since almost every part 
of Aspell has been refactored or rewritten to some extent.

2) Dictionaries and data files are now installed in LIBDIR/aspell-0.60 so 
that Aspell 0.50 and 0.60 can more peacefully coexist.

3) The dictionary format has changed yet again.  I hope this is the last 
time I change it before the Aspell 0.60 but no promises.

4) The format of the character data files has changed.  This should not be 
a problem as Aspell will simply install new ones.

I have also added an appendix to the manual on Languages that Aspell 
should be able to eventually support.

You can find it at http://aspell.net/devel/aspell-0.560-20040317.tar.gz.  
Future versions can be found at http://aspell.net/devel/.  I hope to
eventually be able to upload the snapshots to
ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/aspell/ but I am not authorized to do so yet.

Other changes from Aspell 0.50:

   * Added support for loadable filters thanks to Christoph Hintermüller

   * Enhanced TEX filter to support recognizing accent commands, such as
     the German umlaute, and to treat words with hyphenation characters
     in them as one word, also thanks to Christoph Hintermüller

   * Added gettext support thanks to Sergey Poznyakoff

   * Reworked how the dictionary is stored to take up less space (around
     80% for the English language) and be faster in some cases.

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

   * 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
     OpenOffice (and Mozilla) use.  However, affix compression is
     currently incompatible with sounds like look up which means that
     the suggestion quality will suffer.

   * Added support for MySpell Replacement Tables for better suggestions
     when phonet information is not available.

   * Added support for accepting all input and printing all output in 
     UTF-8 or some other encoding different from the one Aspell uses. 
     Aspell can now support any language that no more than 220 distinct 
     characters, including different capitalizations and accents, _even_ 
     if there is not an existing 8-bit encoding that supports the language.

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


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