Date: Wed, 4 Feb 2004 22:09:57 -0500 (EST)
From: Kevin Atkinson <kevina@gnu.org>
Subject: New Aspell Snapshot: 0.51-20040204


I have just released another pre Aspell 0.51 snapshot, version 
0.51-20040204.  This snapshot has lots of small changes.  Some of the more 
significant ones:

  * Added support for storing words with out the jump table information 
    which means that prefixes are no longer expanded when affix 
    compression is used.
  * Added support for MySpell Replacement Tables for better suggestions
    when phonet information is not available.
  * Fixed to compile with Gcc 3.4
  * Lots of code cleanups.

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

I would really appreciate it if people could test it out and report back
any bugs to the appropriate tracker at
http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=245 .

Due to the changes in the build system I would really appreciate it if
package maintains could attempt to package it and report back any
problems.  Since this is a pre-release version please DO NOT replace
Aspell 0.50 with the snapshot as I do not consider it sufficiently stable
yet.  In particular, the way loadable filters are handles and the
dictionary format may change before Aspell 0.51.

I have registered the 'Aspell' domain with the Translation Project 
(http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/translation/HTML/index.html).  This means 
that if you wish to contribute to contribute a translation for Aspell you 
should go through them.

You can find the snapshot at
http://aspell.net/devel/aspell-0.51-20040204.tar.gz

Future snapshots will be uploaded to http://aspell.net/devel/.  It is
unlikely that I will announce every snapshot release to
aspell-announce.  So, if you are interested in following Aspell
development I suggest you subscribe to aspell-devel.

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