[Dict-common-dev] UTF-8 and ispell

[Paul Boekholt]

2007/9/28, Agustin Martin <agustin.martin at hispalinux.es>:
> > Now, we have to make a plan to release this to Debian.  The first step would
> > be to integrate the new ispell.sl in jed-extra, either by making a new
> > upstream release of jedmodes or simply by integrating the patch. The second
> > step will be to release the new dictionaries-common package [Agustín: please
> > review my patch to the dictionaries-common package attached below; it
> > applies against the CVS sources as two days ago].  It has to be done in this
> > order, otherwise jed will fail when loading jed-ispell-dicts.sl.

I'll update the modes upstream, but probably not this weekend. I'll probably
add a check if aspell is installed, also I have to update the documentation.

>
> This means we need a versioned conflict on jed-extra in dictionaries-common.
> Another possibility is try adding a fake definition for the aspell adding
> function in case is not defined, but I do not know if this is possible and
> is probably an overkill. What do you think is better?

I think this can be solved with
#ifexists aspell_add_dictionary
 ...
#endif

> I have been looking at the code and seems OK.

Here too. Except one thing: in the aspell handling code, you've added
    $otherchars =~ s/^\[//;
    $otherchars =~ s/\]$//;
but not in the ispell handling code. I believe it's also needed there.

> However, when testing the resulting file I noticed that bulgarian
> aspell dict uses \xxx octal chars which are not translated.

Does the Bulgarian aspell dict work in Emacs? I don't have the dict
installed, also aspell doesn't work for me with Emacs - I get
ispell-init-process: Can't open /usr/lib/ispell/en_GB.hash
This is on Etch, I think this was fixed (see Bug #435545)

If it works in Emacs, does it work by passing the "\xxx" string unchanged
from the info file into the .el file? Does Perl understand "\xxx"
strings? S-Lang does, but only in non-utf8 mode. To get a string that
works out to the same unicode characters both in utf-8 and ascii mode,
you need to use "\x{FF}" hexadecimal constructs.