In software, a spell checker is a software feature that checks for misspellings in a text. Spell-checking features are often embedded in software or services, such as a word processor, email client, electronic dictionary, or search engine.
GNU Aspell, usually called just Aspell, is a free software spell checker designed to replace Ispell. It is the standard spell checker for the GNU operating system. It also compiles for other Unix-like operating systems and Windows. The main program is licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License, the documentation under the GNU Free Documentation License. Dictionaries for it are available for about 70 languages. The primary maintainer is Kevin Atkinson.
Ispell is a spelling checker for Unix that supports most Western languages. It offers several interfaces, including a programmatic interface for use by editors such as Emacs. Unlike GNU Aspell, ispell will only suggest corrections that are based on a Damerau–Levenshtein distance of 1; it will not attempt to guess more distant corrections based on English pronunciation rules.
MySpell is a spell checker that was formerly included with OOo Writer of the free OpenOffice.org office suite.
A grammar checker, in computing terms, is a program, or part of a program, that attempts to verify written text for grammatical correctness. Grammar checkers are most often implemented as a feature of a larger program, such as a word processor, but are also available as a stand-alone application that can be activated from within programs that work with editable text.
There are Unicode typefaces which are open-source and designed to contain glyphs of all Unicode characters, or at least a broad selection of Unicode scripts. There are also numerous projects aimed at providing only a certain script, such as the Arabeyes Arabic font. The advantage of targeting only some scripts with a font was that certain Unicode characters should be rendered differently depending on which language they are used in, and that a font that only includes the characters a certain user needs will be much smaller in file size compared to one with many glyphs. Unicode fonts in modern formats such as OpenType can in theory cover multiple languages by including multiple glyphs per character, though very few actually cover more than one language's forms of the unified Han characters.
This article provides basic comparisons for notable text editors. More feature details for text editors are available from the Category of text editor features and from the individual products' articles. This article may not be up-to-date or necessarily all-inclusive.
TextMaker is a word processor, which aims at utmost compatibility with Microsoft Word, its default document format is .docx.
Enchant is a free software project developed as part of the AbiWord word processor with the aim of unifying access to the various existing spell-checker software. Enchant wraps a common set of functionality present in a variety of existing products/libraries, and exposes a stable API/ABI for doing so. Where a library doesn't implement some specific functionality, Enchant will emulate it.
Texmaker is a free and open-source LaTeX editor with an integrated PDF viewer compatible with Linux, macOS, and Windows. Written entirely as a Qt app, it features many tools needed to develop documents with LaTeX.
OmegaT is a computer-assisted translation tool written in the Java programming language. It is free software originally developed by Keith Godfrey in 2000, and is currently developed by a team led by Aaron Madlon-Kay.
SoftMaker Office is an office suite which aims for compatibility with Microsoft Office. It is available as a one-time purchase, as well as a subscription. A freeware version with a slightly reduced feature set is released under the name SoftMaker FreeOffice.
Linux Libertine is a digital typeface created by the Libertine Open Fonts Project, which aims to create free and open alternatives to proprietary typefaces such as Times New Roman. It was developed with the free font editor FontForge and is licensed under the GNU General Public License and the SIL Open Font License.
Avro Keyboard is a free and open source graphical keyboard software developed by OmicronLab for the Microsoft Windows, Linux, MacOS, and several other software additionally adapted its phonetic layout for Android and iOS operating system. It is the first free Unicode and ANSI compliant Bengali keyboard interface for Windows that was published on 26 March 2003.
Go-oo is a discontinued free office suite which started as a set of patches for OpenOffice.org, then later became an independent fork of OpenOffice.org with a number of enhancements, sponsored by Novell.
OpenTaal is a Dutch foundation which provides free Dutch language files to be used in open-source software spell checking, hyphenation, thesaurus and grammar checking.
Virastyar is a Persian add-in for Microsoft Word that performs Persian spell checking, character standardization, Pinglish transliteration, punctuation correction and calendar conversion. It can conjugate approximately 46,000 simple verb tense, and use inflection and morphological rules to recognize possible extensions of a word. It covers approximately 2,800 non-verbal inflections for nouns, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, numerals, classifiers, and pronouns.
LibreOffice Writer is the free and open-source word processor and desktop publishing component of the LibreOffice software package and is a fork of OpenOffice.org Writer. Writer is a word processor similar to Microsoft Word and Corel's WordPerfect with many similar features, and file format compatibility.
LibreLogo is an integrated development environment (IDE) for computer programming in the programming language Python, which works like the language Logo using interactive vector turtle graphics. Its final output is a vector graphics rendition within the LibreOffice suite. It can be used for education and desktop publishing.
LanguageTool is a free and open-source grammar, style, and spell checker, and all its features are available for download. The LanguageTool website connects to a proprietary sister project called LanguageTool Premium, which provides improved error detection for English and German, as well as easier revision of longer texts, following the open-core model.
