[isabelle-dev] NEWS: Spell-checker support

[Makarius]

*** Prover IDE -- Isabelle/Scala/jEdit ***

* Spell-checker support for document text, comments etc.


This refers to Isabelle/282f3b06fa86.

Spell-checker support was one of the many missing bits over the years. 
Last Friday afternoon I intended to spend a few hours to integrate one of 
the existing jEdit plugins, but it turned out a few days to make it more 
than half finished (using the plugins only to get some general ideas).

The current state is already somewhat usable, but a few details are still 
missing.  Early adopters may already take a look, and point out further 
omissions.


The underlying JOrtho 1.0 engine (which is relatively new) is a bit funny. 
Its Java sources are full of spelling mistakes, so maybe the author is 
just dyslexic and wants to help himself.  Moreover he uses the largest 
possible dictionary by default (generated from Wiktionary), but a good 
spell-checker needs to be somewhere in between too short vs. too long word 
lists.

The present Isabelle component jortho-1.0-1 bundles the very good English 
dictionaries from http://wordlist.sourceforge.net/ which are also used in 
GNU Aspell, Hunspell (Open Office, Firefox) etc.  I might need to revisit 
that again, to make sure that the parameters for English variants come out 
exactly as normally used in aspell.


Last week I did not know anything about spell-checking yet, and I need to 
continue this a bit more, until it reaches production quality, and 
starting up Emacs for old-fashioned ispell can be avoided altogether.


 	Makarius