Spell Checker Integration

The hunspell checker is fast becoming a default spell checker on Linux. Red Hat recently made patches available to splits it out of OpenOffice.org and allows Hunspell use on Mozilla.

On Windows there is no equivalent global spell checker. Although the CSAPI (Common Spell checker API) is available it is actually only used for MS Office. Allowing MS Office to use a platform spell checker such as Hunspell would make it integrate into the host platform and mean that users only need to maintain one spell checker. It also means that they can use OSS spell checkers for languages that aren't even available on MS Office.

The CSAPI spec is closed. So anyone undertaking this would need to first reverse engineer the CSAPI. v1 circa 1994 was available in MSDN under some license. However v3 the current version is not available unless you sign an NDA with Microsoft. It might be worth seeing that NDA and understanding the limitations that it would place on you.

An interesting side effect of this work would be that the CSAPI would be documented and actually for the first time become a Common instead on a Microsoft Office API.

Another view on this issue might be to use one of the already existing open APIs with an FOSS implementation on Windows for new applications, because it is counter-productive to further the spread of a closed API (especially one that is only used in one product and which works as native in wine just fine). A similar argument may be made for MS Office in regard to enhancing it (which would allow it to compete better with FOSS applications).