Aspell, Hunspell for Tamil

Using GNU ASpell

To install in Ubuntu

$ sudo apt-get install aspell

$ sudo apt-get install aspell-ta

which gets the aspell application, and the Tamil dictionary and Tamil affix files for this project.

Usage

$ aspell -l ta {{filename}}

Aspell in action – via Terminal

---

---

Using Hunspell

To install in Ubuntu

$ sudo apt-get install hunspell

Navigate to the path, /usr/share/hunspell/ and install the ta_IN.aff and ta_IN.dic files published by Ashok Ramachandran at TamilNLP or by Elanjelian at Thamizha. This package has not been updated in 7 years. Volunteers needed. Saranya Selvaraj, from Kanchi LUG, published a post in 2009, detailing how to generate affix files and dictionary files for hunspell from a raw wordlist; this needs working with hunspell sources.

Usage

$ hunspell -i utf-8 -d ta_IN {{filename}}

Currently, my installation is incomplete on Ubuntu and this is all I could manage:

Hunspell in action – setup affix files are not perfect in my installation.

Programmatic Use

Using the Python subprocess module concept of pipes we can send a text-file into these spell-checker for suggestion/mis-spelling generation from within your application. One example of such use is added recently to Open-Tamil library to connect aspell, which will be published later on tamilpesu.us.

from spell import ASpell
x=ASpell()
q=x.spellcheck("கட்டுரை")