Enchant (software)

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Enchant is a free software project developed as part of the Abiword word-processor with the aim of unifying access to the various existing spell-checker software. Enchant wraps a common set of functionality present in a variety of existing products/libraries, and exposes a stable API/ABI for doing so. Where a library doesn't implement some specific functionality, Enchant will emulate it.

Enchant is capable of having multiple backends loaded at once. As of January 2006 it has support for 6 backends:

Aspell/Pspell (intends to replace Ispell)
Ispell (old, could be interpreted as defacto standard)
MySpell (an OpenOffice.org project, also used by Mozilla, Thunderbird and Firefox)
Uspell (primarily Yiddish, Hebrew, and Eastern European languages - hosted in AbiWord's CVS under the module "uspell")
Hspell (Hebrew)
AppleSpell (Mac OSX)

Enchant is currently licensed under the LGPL license, with an Exception so that non-free (as in speech and/or cost) plugin backends could be loaded and used by Enchant. This is mainly so that it can use the native spell checkers on various platforms (MacOS X, MS Office, ...), or that users could "plug in" their favorite commercial product to do the job.

External links

[Project homepage]

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