[voikko] Voikko Win32 binaries

[Harri Pitkänen]

Hi!

On Thursday 20 March 2008, Fredrik Corneliusson wrote:
> Hi,
> I would like to add Voikko support to an application that uses
> (Py)Enchant as it is supported as a backend.
> Is there any pre-compiled Win32 binaries that I can download or will I
> have to compile from source? And in that case is there any (license?)
> reason there are no binaries for download?

We (as in Voikko project) do not provide binaries, because updating and 
supporting them would take away too much time form the development. There are 
no license reasons not to offer them. You can find pre-compiled binaries for 
example from openoffice.org-voikko Windows extension. The extension and its 
sources can be downloaded from
  http://www.konsulttilatka.fi/ooo/voikko/
The binaries are in voikko.oxt, which is just a zip package. File voikko.dll 
is specific to OpenOffice.org, but the rest of the files can be used in other 
applications too. You probably have to build the Enchant provider plugin for 
Voikko yourself, I do not remember anyone having built that for Windows 
before. I do not expect that there will be any problems building that, it is 
already part of the official Enchant source tree.

You can distribute these binaries with your application as long as you follow 
the terms of the GPL license.

> Also is Hunspell totally useless for finish? If not where can I find
> dictionaries?

It is mostly useless at the moment, so much that nobody has made complete 
Finnish dictionaries for it. Older Myspell dictionaries work with Hunspell 
too and can be found from Debian or other Linux distributions. But they have 
much worse coverage of Finnish language than Voikko has (Myspell dictionaries 
cover around 90 % of words in typical Finnish text, Voikko covers about 
99 %).

> I'm sorry if this has already been asked on the list but I don't know
> Finnish so I cant really check if it has.

I probably should add some more information about this in the English sections 
of our website. Meanwhile feel free to ask any questions here, it is quite OK 
to do so.

Harri