[libvoikko] Libvoikko compiled for Android

[Harri Pitkänen]

On Monday 06 August 2012, Sjur Moshagen wrote:
> > Only backends that do not require any external libraries (VFST and
> > Malaga) have been built for now. Supporting other backends is slightly
> > more complicated but definitely possible. Is anyone interested in having
> > HFST spellers for Android? This is mostly useful for recent Androids
> > (4.0 or later) since these have a system spell checker framework that
> > can be extended with custom implementations.
> 
> HFST spellers for Android - what can I say... we couldn't be more happy :)

Ok, I'll check if it is easy to build hfst-ospell on Android as a part of the 
combined libvoikko binary.

> We have got a gentle push to make sure the most common mobile OS's have
> proper support for the Sámi languages (none of them do at present), and
> adding keyboards and spell checkers to Android is the first part of that
> project. We already have some preliminary keyboard layout design, and
> we're just starting to look at the implementation. Adding a working
> speller checker would be the next thing, and we have briefly looked at how
> this is presently done for Norwegian (list-based it seems). Having HFST
> transducers directly in there would be a huge thing for us:)
> 
> By HFST spellers - do you mean *.zhfst files?

Preferably not. Android packages are already zip files so having zip inside 
zip may slow things down too much for no gain. Simplest thing would be to just 
unpack the zhfst speller into the assets folder of the application package. It 
will still get packed with zip compression but just once.

I assume that we will want to provide the users just single application to 
download and not require them to download separate dictionaries. The current 
hack to use SD card for dictionaries is just a temporary thing. In reality 
Android does not guarantee that external storage or network connectivity is 
actually present so separate dictionaries might be impossible to implement 
reliably.

Harri