Enchant (software)

Infobox Software
name = Enchant



caption =
developer = Enchant developers
latest_release_version = 1.4.2
latest_release_date = May 05, 2008
operating_system = Cross-platform
genre = Spell checker
license = Variant of LGPL
website = [http://www.abisource.com/projects/enchant/ Enchant]

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 de-facto standard)
* Hunspell/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 OS X)Enchant is currently licensed under 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, ...), and users can use their favorite third-party product to do the job.

External links

* [http://www.abisource.com/projects/enchant Project homepage]