Aspell is an Open Source spell checker designed to eventually replace Ispell. Its main feature is that it does a much better job of coming up with possible suggestions than Ispell does. In fact recent tests shows that it even does better than Microsoft Word 97's spell checker in some cases. In addition it has both compile time and run time support for other non-English languages. Aspell is also a library however the recommend way to use aspell is through the Pspell library as the actual interface to the aspell library is constantly changing.
Aspell | Ispell | Netscape 4.0 | Microsoft Word 97 | |
Open Source | x | x | ||
Suggestion Intelligence | 88-98 | 54 | 55-70? | 71 |
Personal part of Suggestions | x | x | x | |
Alternate Dictionaries | x | x | ? | ? |
International Support | x | x | ? | ? |
The suggestion Intelligence is based on a small test kernel of misspelled/correct word pairs. Go to http://aspell.sourceforge.net/test for more info and how you can help contribute to the test kernel. The current scores for aspell are 88 in fast mode, 93 in normal mode, and 98 in bad spellers mode see section 5.4.5 for more information about the various suggestion modes.
If you have any other information you would like to add to this chart please contact me at kevina at users sourceforge net.