Creating a Ladino spell-checker and including it in OS projects

[Dan Kenigsberg]

On Wed, Jun 01, 2022 at 06:47:41AM +0300, Gabor Szabo wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I've been working on an online Ladino (Judeo-Espanyol) dictionary
> https://diksionaryo.szabgab.com/ The code is open source the content is
> CC BY-SA 4.0  https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
> All linked from the About page.
> Along with the creation of the translation I also have a (growing) list of
> ladino words.
> 
> I would like to make this available as a spell checker in various Open
> Source tools.
> E.g. Firefox, Chromium, LibreOffice etc.
> I wrote about it a few weeks ago
> https://szabgab.com/add-spellchecker-to-various-applications.html but I am
> still unclear what and how to do.
> 
> I started to generate a pair of files that resemble the format of hspell,
> but I don't know how to really test them and in any case they don't seem to
> work well.
> I also don't know how to distribute what I already have and how to make it
> included in those projects.
> 
> Anyone here has experience with spell-checkers?
> Could anyone help me in the project or at least point me in the right
> direction?

Well, if I were you, I'd start by creating a github repository with your
code and a tagged version of your artifacts, these .aff and .dic files
used by hunspell.

This would let anyone with high-enough motivation the ability to test it
on their own machine (I may volunteer).

Next, I'm afraid, comes specialized packaging for different environments.
In hspell I added Makefile targets for hunspell-he.rpm and for Mozilla
xpi. The former is good enough for most application on
Fedora/CentOS/RHEL. Then you could propose the rpm to Fedora;
or the xpi to Mozilla; or hope that someone else does it for you for
OSes and applications you are not familiar with.

It's a long process, but when it works it's quite satisfying.

Good luck,
Dan.