Re: build it vs. adapt it

[Nadim Shaikli <shaikli at yahoo dot com>]

--- Behdad Esfahbod <behdad at cs dot toronto dot edu> wrote:
> This is 2005 now, our editors (gedit) support Arabic, our
> spell-cheker (aspell) can easily support arabic, given enough
> interest from a working man, and any support for Arabic OCR
> belongs to an OCR project like GOCR IMHO.  Although the
> algorithms may be quite different, but there's a lot of code that
> is shared between any two OCR application.  GOCR is actively
> developed (released 0.40 last month), and three years old now.
> 
>   http://jocr.sf.net/

Behdad, alot of what we do will sooner or later make it into the
more mainstream applications (consider them proof-of-concept and
intent as well as clear indicator of seriousness about the topic).
Alot of "our" Arabic-centric projects, as you note, were started
after lengthy conversations with the various developers (such as
duali - the spell-checker) to where Arabic inclusion was VERY
unlikely -- aspell, back then, was in that boat.  And even in the
case of duali we've had a number of conversations here and elsewhere
about getting it adapted (I'm unaware of aspell's current status
and abilities and so I don't know if it's easier now or harder to
include Arabic).

Our collective intent has always been to contribute upstream to
the more popular applications and that will happen, but alot of
work can take place without the consent and/or approval of the
upstream application to flush out various ideas/algorithms.
Arabeyes' about [1] page clearly notes this as well,

  "Arabeyes' goal is not to create new applications (if those
   applications exist), but to incorporate modifications/additions
   to existing common everyday-use applications."

Hope that makes sense - in short, we fully agree.

Salam.

 - Nadim


		
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