Enchant (software)

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 May 2009 it has support for 8 backends:

• Aspell/Pspell (intends to replace Ispell)
• Ispell (old, could be interpreted as de facto standard)
• Hunspell/MySpell (an LibreOffice 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 OS X)
• Voikko (Finnish)
• Zemberek (Turkish)

Enchant is currently licensed under GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL), with an additional permission notice saying that any plugin backend can be loaded and used by Enchant. This ensures that it can use the native spell checkers on various platforms (Mac OS X, Microsoft Office, Amazon Kindle...), and users can use their favorite third-party product to do the job.

References

External links

• Project homepage
• PyEnchant - Python bindings for Enchant