[Dict-common-dev] debian ispell.el: adding a new dictionary for aspell

[Agustin Martin Domingo]

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Nick Patavalis wrote:
> I 've been using "ispell" ("aspell" to be precise) and "ispell.el" for
> quite some time. As Greek is my native tongue, and as it is not, by
> default, supported by ispell, what I used to do was to copy a fresh
> version of the ispell.el script in my "~/lib/emacs/" (which comes
> first in the load-path) and apply the following patch (I recently
> submitted this to Ken Stevens for inclusion in the next official
> ispell.el dists):

If aspell dicts want to use ispell.el they must register themselves with 
the required values, that is the only place where the dict-common policy 
affect aspell dictionaries. That is true both for dictionaries already 
defined in ispell.el and for dictionaries not defined in ispell.el. I do 
not know if there are currently aspell dicts using that, apart from my 
aspell-gl-minimos package.

I think the way to go is aspell-el doing that. The info-aspell file 
would be something like the attached one (done after your patch, but 
that will of course need testing in a greek environment). I am not 
cc'ing aspell-el package since aspell-el maintainer reads this list. 
More info at

http://dict-common.alioth.debian.org

> 
> Unfortunately, though this seems very similar to the ad-hoc method
> described above, _it doesn't work!_ One problem, strange as it may
> sound, seems to be with "iso-8859-7". Whenever a add a dictionary with
> this encoding, from then-on, the "ispell-change-dictionary" command
> stops working!
> 
> Is this the correct way to add support for a new local dictionary to
> ispell?

There is currently no explicit support for globally adding local 
dictionaries, although you can currently add one by simply adding an 
info-aspell file in /var/lib/dictionaries-common/aspell with the 
required values and running '/usr/sbin/update-default-aspell --rebuild'. 
At some time I will add support for putting local aspell-info entries 
under /etc/dictionaries-common.

> 
> Why the "iso-8859-7" entry seems to cause that much trouble (remember
> that the scenario with the modified "ispell.el", works fine!).

Because ispell.el has a limited number of allowed coding systems 
hardcoded. I already added iso-8859-3 for esperanto and will upload 
today a new package including iso-8859-7, after I have checked that it 
is available in all emacsen currently in sarge (and also in emacs20 that 
is no longer there). I received a nice patch allowing any supported 
coding system, but since the list of allowed coding systems is different 
  for the different emacsen flavours I decided to keep adding individual 
entries after checking that they are present in all emacsen flavours. 
Otherwise it might not work in some flavours in a very confusing way.

Cheers,

-- 
Agustin

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 name="aspell-el.info-aspell"
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Language: greek (Greek)
Hash-Name: greek
Emacsen-Name: greek
Casechars: [\341\342\343\344\345\346\347\350\351\352\353\354\355\356\357\360\361\363\362\364\365\366\367\370\371\301\302\303\304\305\306\307\310\311\312\313\314\315\316\317\320\321\323\324\325\326\327\330\331\334\335\336\337\374\375\376\266\270\271\272\274\276\277\351\373\332\333\300\340]
Not-Casechars: [^\341\342\343\344\345\346\347\350\351\352\353\354\355\356\357\360\361\363\362\364\365\366\367\370\371\301\302\303\304\305\306\307\310\311\312\313\314\315\316\317\320\321\323\324\325\326\327\330\331\334\335\336\337\374\375\376\266\270\271\272\274\276\277\351\373\332\333\300\340]
Otherchars: [']
Many-Otherchars: 
Additionalchars: 
Ispell-Args: -C
Extended-Character-Mode: 
Coding-System: iso-8859-7

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