Afrikaans Spelling checker

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Picard

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A collegue has been bugging me for an Afrikaans spelling checker for some time now. I had a spelling checker installed on her computer a format or two ago but it was a schlep to install and I'm instead looking for something simpler.

Any suggestions, please?

EDIT: Oh, and of course being the cheap skate that I am, it should be free!!! :D
 
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Open Office comes with an Afrikaans spell checker, just look for it under dictionaries on their site.
 
The NWU spell checker is developed by CText (www.ctext.co.za) and works quite well. It's installed on campus PC and the response seems to be quite favourable, at least from those who uses it.
 
Probably not helpful, but firefox has an Afrikaans spell checker.
 
If all you're after is the spelling of words several of the online / free spell checkers should do the job fine. As for the words that isn't in the dictionary you can just add them manually. However for more complicated tasks such as grammar, hyphenation etc. the commercial products should be a vast improvement. Maybe there is a demo / trial version available?
 
Easiest might be OpenOffice. Download it as an add-on. Though I have for OO3 and it wasn't too great.
 
At least it is available for free so if it's not that great it at least didn't cost you anything.
 
exactly. was worth the shot. major languages will be much better as there probably are bigger teams working on them. OO3 in Afrikaans hasn't been released yet.
 
Summary of Afrikaans spell checkers

Probably more info then you need but hope this helps.... I work for Translate.org.za and ported the current spell checker to work with OpenOffice.org.

Available Afrikaans spell checkers:
  • DAC - a little known checker, it could be that I'm the only person in the world with a copy. Not worth the effort.
  • wspel - wordlist based, it uses a list of words in a custom dictionary. People who use it say its OK and the massive wordlist doesn't seem to slow things down. It will only work in Microsoft Word. FREE
  • pukke - produced by NWU it can handle agglutination i.e. joined words. Its language coverage should be good. It will cost you anything from R220-R300
  • pharos - not sure if they sell this any more. I'd suggest going with the pukke checker if your going to pay cash.
  • translate.org.za - based on lists from the 80s and heavily updated since. Used in Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice.org and now almost all Linux distributions. Uses hunspell as its checking engine. OPEN SOURCE.

If you are a C guru then I would really like to speak to you about porting the Translate.org.za checkers to Windows. The Translate checkers can also be used on the Mac OS X as a platform wide spell checker.

Most Windows checkers are in fact Microsoft Office checkers. So no joy for you in terms of a platform wide checker. Blame Microsoft for that.

We're working on a Zulu spell checker, Open Source of course and should simply drop in and work with the same apps I mentioned above.

If you see problems with our checkers, please tell us and please help us make them better. Currently we're looking for people able to do some of the following:
  • Validate words
  • Classify words
  • Code to help hunspell to Afrikaans agglutination

With regards to hyphenation and grammar checkers. OpenOffice.org does hyphenation for Afrikaans for about 2-3 years already :) It doesn't do grammar checking and to be honest I don't think any office software is at the level were you should be trusting their advice. People are still better at grammar then machines. If you are making a decision based on whether there is a grammar checker rather use your money to buy a beer or send it to us to make your free checker better, honestly your wasting your bucks.

And of course I'm biased :)
 
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