Original author(s) Development status active | Developer(s) Enchant developers Written in C | |
 | ||
Stable release 2.2.2 / July 23, 2013; 3 years ago (2013-07-23) Operating system | ||
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.
Enchant is capable of having multiple backends loaded at once. As of May 2009 it has support for 8 backends:
LaTeXila and gedit rely on the gspell library, which acts as a wrapper around enchant.
Enchant is currently licensed under GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL), with an additional permission notice saying that any plugin backend can be loaded and used by Enchant. This ensures that it can use the native spell checkers on various platforms (Mac OS X, Microsoft Office, Amazon Kindle, etc.), and users can use their favorite third-party product to do the job.