[Aspell-user] Output suggestions and accept first suggestion always?

[Samuel Murray]

G'day everyone

I would like to use Aspell for something it was probably not designed 
for, so I apologise in advance :-)

I know I can get Aspell to output a list of unrecognised words from a 
spellchecked document (I use this method for spellchecking in OmegaT). 
I also know that Aspell can suggest corrections.  But can I get Aspell 
to output not the unrecognised words but the suggested corrections 
instead?  And/or can I get Aspell to automatically accept the first 
suggestion?

I'll be honest with my goal... I'm an unofficial volunteer for a 
spellchecker project that runs in Microsoft Word (freeware but not free 
software).  The spellchecker spellchecks Afrikaans documents in English 
with a custom dictionary in Afrikaans.  It's not the best solution but 
many people seem satisfied with it.  Spellchecking in English has some 
disadvantages, for example the English word "department" looks a lot 
like the Afrikaans word "departement".  If the user types "department" 
(a spelling error in Afrikaans), the spellchecker won't indicate the 
word as a spelling error.  The kludge is an autocorrect function that 
changes "department" to "departement" (or "departmentq") as soon as the 
user types the word.  It is this autocorrect list that I'd like to 
create... by getting Aspell to give me a list of English words that are 
most likely misspellings of the Afrikaans words in my list.

Can this be done?  If so, what would the syntax be?  Or if not, and you 
feel like it, does anyone know of a method which may be useful to me? 
I'm a Windows l-user but I can use Linux (or cygwin) if I really, really 
try hard :-).

Thanks!
Samuel Murray
http://www.leuce.com/translate/