Things remaining to be done to ispell:
- It might be nice to support multiple personal dictionaries. On
the other hand, it's pretty easy to combine them with "cat".
- A small amount of string space could be saved if buildhash would
combine strings with common suffixes (e.g., "and" could be stored
as a pointer to the tail of "bland").
- (Pace Willisson) Pace's latest version of ispell compresses
common digrams to reduce the size of the hash file, and stores
shorter words in the dictionary entry itself. (Since the digram
compression also reduces word size, this is a big win). He also
improved startup time, at a slight running-time penalty, by
eliminating the mass conversion of string indexes to pointers
and just using the indexes as such whenever a string is accessed.
- The findaffix script takes ridiculous amounts of time and disk
space. It desperately needs to be rewritten in C, which would
also allow it to correctly support string characters and to
suppress reporting of choices that are already in the affix file.
- Some of the following ideas require more flag bits in the
dictionary. Since there is only one bit remaining for most
cases, I plan to use that bit as some sort of an indicator
that more flag bits reside somewhere else. This will be a
kludge, but it will save some space. Beware! Don't plan on
using that last flag bit for something else.
- (Ian Dall) For some applications, it can be handy to allow
multiple dictionary hash files. This shouldn't be too hard, since
there's already similar code to support the personal dictionary.
- (Not mine, but I've lost the name of the originator.)
Some misspellings are common, but corrections will not ever
be found by ispell's algorithm. It would be nice to be able
to explicitly specify misspelling/correction pairs for such
words (e.g., "lite->light").
- Several people, notably Peter Mutsaers, have asked if the
affix file format could be extended to allow limited
variables, so that you could specify things like
"[AEIOU][DNL] > \2ING" to handle words like "pad->padding".
- Ispell should be smart enough to ignore hyphenation signs,
such as the TeX \- hyphenation indicator.
- Since there can be two personal dictionaries, there should
be a way to specify which dictionary a new word ("I"
command) should be inserted into.
- For languages that form lots of compound words, such as
German, munchlist should be smart enough to split compound
words into their components when appropriate.
- (Jeff Edmonds) The personal dictionary should be able to
remove certain words from the master dictionary, so that
obscure words like "wether" wouldn't mask favorite typos.
- (Jeff Edmonds) It would be wonderful if ispell could correct
inserted spaces such as "th e" for "the" or even "can not"
for "cannot".
- Since ispell has dictionaries available to it, it is
conceivable that it could automatically determine the
language of a particular file by choosing the dictionary
that produced the fewest spelling errors on the first few
lines.
- It is long past the time when the ispell.1 manual page
should have been broken up into components describing the
various programs in the suite.
- If the -C flag is disabled, ispell should (at least
optionally) use the "??" form to suggestion possible
compound formations.
- The elisp interface should provide a way for ispell to
return error messages to emacs, so that users don't get
inexplicable failures when things like dictionary open
failures happen.
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