UTF-8 and ispell

[Rafael Laboissiere]

* Paul Boekholt <p.boekholt at gmail.com> [2007-09-22 14:52]:

> > > Does anybody still use ispell? Why, when aspell is better?
> >
> > I still use ispell because I frequently call ispell_change_dictionary.  If
> > there is a reasonable way of switching dictionaries in jed when using
> > aspell, then I would use use aspell instead of ispell.  Could ispell.sl be
> > changed in order to achieve that?  Maybe we shoudl add calls like:
> >
> >     aspell_add_dictionary (
> >       "german-new8-utf8",
> >       "ngerman",
> >       "de_DE");
> >
> > and then, when Ispell_Program_Name is set to "aspell", call aspell like
> > this: "aspell -a -l german-new8-utf8".  I could do the necessary changes to
> > the dictionaries-common package in order to make this work in Debian.
> 
> I'm not sure what you're after here, so far I've used the same data
> structures for dealing with both ispell and aspell and it's worked OK for
> me. But if you use some languages that are supported by ispell, and others
> that are supported by aspell, then it could be improved.

What I am after is to find a way to provide automatically in Debian the
options for ispell_change_dictionary when the user is using
Ispell_Program_Name = "aspell" and she has only aspell-<lang> packages
installed in the system.

> What's happening with aspell in Debian anyway? In
> http://dict-common.alioth.debian.org/dsdt-policy.html it says
> 
> Because of the major changes in aspell 0.50 most aspell elements present in
> previous versions of this policy are being removed. Specifically
> pspell-ispell support is no longer available and pwli files are no longer
> used. Some way of coordinating ispell and aspell use under emacs is being
> implemented (see the Section called Registering aspell dictionaries for use
> from within emacs). Besides that, some reference to aspell might have been
> left in the document, so be careful with them.
> 
> Is that document still up to date?

Yes, it is, as far as I know.  IIRC, The paragraph above was written when
aspell went form 0.50 to 0.60 and the aspell support became much simpler,
including the dropping of pspell support.  I agree with you that the
paragraph above sounds awkward nowadays.  I will talk about this with the
current maintainer of dictionaries-common.

Thanks,

-- 
Rafael