Clank

Clank is a spelling helper written in Scala for lazy typists who write in languages with funny characters. Using an appropriate configuration, for example

"Mogen Sie Gluck?"

becomes

"Mögen Sie Glück?"

It tries doing this one thing with the least amount of hassle for the user. Clank doesn't aim to replace traditional spell checkers.

How it works

Based on a user-specified mapping from chars to sets of chars Clank translates the chars of each input word so that the word is contained in a user-specified dictionary file. If ambiguities come up Clank warns the user on stderr, listing all possible spellings found.

Setup

Building from Source

To build from source you will need sbt.

To build the standalone JAR, run

$ sbt update proguard

You will then find it at target/scala_a.b.c/clank_a.b.c-x.v.z.min.jar.

Downloading the standalone JAR

There should be standalone JARs of Clank in the download section. The latest version, I think, is here!

Configuration

Clank is configured in $HOME/.clankrc.

There are 4 options. Each has to be supplied:

• wordrx: A regex for matching words in the target language
• dict: The target language text dictionary to be used (one word per line)
• translations: The character translations in use, each separated by :, first character being the src, rest being dst characters
• maxwordlength: Maximum length of words to consider

Options are specified one per line in this format:

optionName = value

Here is an example configuration:

~/.clankrc

wordrx = [a-zA-Z]+
dict = /usr/share/dict/ngerman
translations = aä : oö : uü : UÜ : OÖ : AÄ :sß
maxwordlength = 20

Usage

Clank reads its input text from standard input and outputs either to a file specified as its first argument or to standard output. Ambiguities (different word translations that are matched in the dictionary) are printed on standard error.

Examples

A standalone JAR of Clank is in the current directory and named clank.jar.

Content of input_file:

Mogen Sie Gluck? Konnen Sie vielleicht helfen? Vielleicht wenn
Sie einen Keks gehabt hatten, ware es nie dazu gekommen.

The example configuration above is used.

Piping from a file and hiding ambiguities while outputting to stdout

$ java -jar clank.jar < input_file 2>/dev/null

Output (stdout)

Mögen Sie Glück? Können Sie vielleicht helfen? Vielleicht wenn
Sie einen Keks gehabt hatten, ware es nie dazu gekommen.

Piping from a file outputting to output_file

$ java -jar clank.jar output_file < input_file

Output (stderr)

| Ambiguity[output_file](2,23) |  < hätten | hatten >
| Ambiguity[output_file](2,31) |  < wäre | Ware >

Output (output_file)

Mögen Sie Glück? Können Sie vielleicht helfen? Vielleicht wenn
Sie einen Keks gehabt hatten, ware es nie dazu gekommen.

License

Distributed under the GPLv3. See COPYING.