We are glad to announce that the ground work is laid for using OpenOffice spell checker dictionaries in Help & Manual! While the spell checker in Help & Manual for English is up to the standards, the dictionaries for other several languages are unfortunately not perfect. We need better dictionaries in H&M for German, Swedish, Spanish and couple of languages that are not supported yet. And you are going to get it!
OpenOffice has excellent spell checking dictionaries that can be used for free, and a vivid community helping to update them where necessary. However, using these dictionaries and therefore writing a new spell checker from ground is really a major undertaking.
To make this a little bit easier, we decided to start an Open Source project ourselfs, and publish the spell checker components separately. It's a matter of giving back to the community, too. We are also working very closely with the vendor of the current spell checking engine to combine both our work to our mutual advantage. This is a good example how open source and commercial software can peacefully coexist.
So... Swedish, Spanish, German and Russian help writers, stay tuned. We are working on spell checking and automatic hyphenation.
