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Diffstat (limited to 'runtime/doc/develop.txt')
| -rw-r--r-- | runtime/doc/develop.txt | 30 |
1 files changed, 28 insertions, 2 deletions
diff --git a/runtime/doc/develop.txt b/runtime/doc/develop.txt index 6e4f4e35a..bc8b0e8c0 100644 --- a/runtime/doc/develop.txt +++ b/runtime/doc/develop.txt @@ -1,4 +1,4 @@ -*develop.txt* For Vim version 7.0aa. Last change: 2004 Jan 17 +*develop.txt* For Vim version 7.0aa. Last change: 2005 Mar 29 VIM REFERENCE MANUAL by Bram Moolenaar @@ -366,7 +366,33 @@ window View on a buffer. There can be several windows in Vim, fit in the shell. -To be continued... +Spell checking *develop-spell* + +When spell checking was going to be added to Vim a survey was done over the +available spell checking libraries and programs. Unfortunately, the result +was that none of them provided sufficient capabilities to be used as the spell +checking engine in Vim, for various reasons: + +- Missing support for multi-byte encodings. At least UTF-8 must be supported, + so that more than one language can be used in the same file. +- For the programs and libraries: Using them as-is would require installing + them separately from Vim. That's not impossible, but a drawback. +- Performance: A few tests showed that it's possible to check spelling on the + fly (while redrawing), just like syntax highlighting. But the mechanisms + used by other code are much slower. Myspell uses a simplistic hashtable, + for example. +- For a program like aspell a communication mechanism would have to be setup. + That's complicated to do in a portable way (Unix-only would be relatively + simple, but that's not good enough). And performance will become a problem + (lots of process switching involved). +- Missing support for words with non-word characters, such as "Etten-Leur" and + "et al.", would require marking the pieces of them OK, lowering the + reliability. +- Missing support for regions or dialects. Makes it difficult to accept + all English words and highlight non-Canadian words differently. +- Missing support for rare words. Many words are correct but hardly ever used + and could be a misspelled often-used word. + ============================================================================== 4. Assumptions *design-assumptions* |