This release adds the ability to use multiple dictionaries in the same
spell-checking session. This can be useful for checking multilingual text in
situations where passages or words cannot be marked as being in a particular
language (for example, plain text or Markdown), and for specialised texts
where a subject-specific dictionary is useful. The functionality is based on
the Google Summer of Code “composite dictionary” project by Vidhoon
Vishwanathan from 2013; a big thanks to him for his work! I have simplified
his original design, and the implementation in Vala is entirely mine, so he
is not to blame for any faults it may have in its current form.
Multiple dictionaries are specified by a change to the dictionary tag
format: most of Enchant’s APIs and its command-line front-end now accept a
comma-separated list of tags. (This means of course that commas may no
longer be used in dictionary tags; but until recently that was not allowed
in any case.)
A minor change has been made to an existing API: enchant_dict_suggest is now
specified to return an empty list when there are no suggestions. This makes
it easier to distinguish an error (when NULL is returned) from there simply
being no suggestions. While this is formally an API change, I am not
incrementing the major library version as in fact this API was already able
to return an empty list; and in any case, callers were unlikely to rely on
the list being non-empty.
The Doxygen documentation has been greatly improved: documentation of
internal code has been removed, while the public C and C++ header files are
now clearly documented (in particular, the Doxygen documentation did not
previously contain proper documentation for the C header file). The
documentation of the C API has also been improved in several places.
The test suite files have been renamed with shorter, less redundant names,
to make them easier to navigate.
Some minor improvements to and simplifications of the build system and code
have also been made.