This is aspell.info, produced by makeinfo version 5.2 from aspell.texi.

This is the user’s manual for Aspell

GNU Aspell is a spell checker designed to eventually replace Ispell.  It
can either be used as a library or as an independent spell checker.

Copyright © 2000–2026 Kevin Atkinson.

     Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this
     document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License,
     Version 1.1 or any later version published by the Free Software
     Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts and no
     Back-Cover Texts.  A copy of the license is included in the section
     entitled "GNU Free Documentation License".
INFO-DIR-SECTION GNU Packages
START-INFO-DIR-ENTRY
* Aspell: (aspell).        GNU Aspell spelling checker
END-INFO-DIR-ENTRY


File: aspell.info,  Node: Top,  Next: Introduction,  Up: (dir)

GNU Aspell 0.60.8.2
*******************

This is the user’s manual for Aspell

GNU Aspell is a spell checker designed to eventually replace Ispell.  It
can either be used as a library or as an independent spell checker.

* Menu:

* Introduction::                
* Support::                     
* Basic Usage::                 
* Customizing Aspell::          
* Working With Dictionaries::   
* Writing programs to use Aspell::  
* Adding Support For Other Languages::  
* Implementation Notes::        
* Installing::                  
* ChangeLog::                   
* Authors::                     
* Copying::                     

 — The Detailed Node Listing —

Basic Usage

* Spellchecking Individual Files::  
* Using Aspell as a Replacement for Ispell::  
* Using Aspell with other Applications::  

Customizing Aspell

* Specifying Options::          
* The Options::                 
* Dumping Configuration Values::  
* Notes on Various Options::    

Notes on Various Options

* Notes on Various Filters and Filter Modes::  
* Notes on the Prefix Option::  
* Notes on Typo-Analysis::      
* Notes on the Different Suggestion Modes::  

Working With Dictionaries

* Using aspell-import::         
* How Aspell Selects an Appropriate Dictionary::  
* Listing Available Dictionaries::  
* Dumping the Contents of the Word List::  
* Creating an Individual Word List::  
* Working With Affix Info in Word Lists::  
* Format of the Personal and Replacement Dictionaries::  
* Using Multi Dictionaries::    
* Dictionary Naming::           
* AWLI files::                  

Writing programs to use Aspell

* Through the C API::           
* Through A Pipe::              
* Notes on Storing Replacement Pairs::  

Adding Support For Other Languages

* The Language Data File::      
* Compiling the Word List::     
* Phonetic Code::               
* The Simple Soundslike::       
* Replacement Tables::          
* Affix Compression::           
* Controlling the Behavior of Compound Words::  
* Creating A New Character Set::  
* Creating An Official Dictionary Package::  

Implementation Notes

* Aspell Suggestion Strategy::  
* Notes on 8-bit Characters::   

Installing

* Generic Install Instructions::
* HTML Manuals and "make clean"::
* Curses Notes::
* Loadable Filter Notes::
* Using 32-Bit Dictionaries on a 64-Bit System::
* Upgrading from Aspell 0.60.7::
* Upgrading from Aspell 0.50::
* Upgrading from Aspell .33/Pspell .12::
* Upgrading from a Pre-0.50 snapshot::
* WIN32 Notes::

Copying

* GNU Free Documentation License::
* GNU Lesser General Public License::



File: aspell.info,  Node: Introduction,  Next: Support,  Prev: Top,  Up: Top

1 Introduction
**************

GNU Aspell is a spell checker designed to eventually replace Ispell.  It
can either be used as a library or as an independent spell checker.  Its
main feature is that it does a much better job of suggesting possible
replacements for a misspelled word than just about any other spell
checker out there for the English language.  Unlike Ispell, Aspell can
also easily check documents in UTF-8 without having to use a special
dictionary.  Aspell will also do its best to respect the current locale
setting.  Other advantages over Ispell include support for using
multiple dictionaries at once and intelligently handling personal
dictionaries when more than one Aspell process is open at once.

The latest version of Aspell can always be found at <http://aspell.net>

1.1 Comparison to other spell checker engines
=============================================

                               Aspell   Ispell   Hunspell   Microsoft
                               0.60.8   2.1.20   1.1.12     Word 97
Open Source                    x        x        x
Suggestion Intelligence        70-85    52       76         70
Personal part of Suggestions   x        x        x          x
Alternate Dictionaries         x        x        x          ?
International Support          x        x        x          ?

The Suggestion Intelligence is based on a small test kernel of
misspelled/correct word pairs.  Go to <http://aspell.net/test/cur/> for
more info and how you can help contribute to the test kernel.

If you have any other information you would like to add to this chart
please contact me at <kevina@gnu.org>.

1.1.1 Comparison to Ispell
--------------------------

1.1.1.1 Features that only Aspell has
.....................................

   • Is an actual library that other programs can link to instead of
     having to use it through a pipe.

   • Does a much better job of suggesting possible replacements for a
     misspelled word than Ispell does or for that matter many other
     spell checkers I have seen.  If you know a spell checker that does
     a better job please let me know.

   • Can learn from user’s misspellings.

   • Can easily check documents in UTF-8 without having to use a special
     dictionary.

   • Has support for using multiple dictionaries at once.

   • Is multiprocess intelligent.  When a personal dictionary (or
     replacement list) is saved, it will now first update the list
     against the dictionary on disk in case another process modified it.

   • Can share the memory used in the main word list between processes.

   • A better, more complete word list for the English language.  Word
     lists are provided for American, British, and Canadian spelling.
     Special care has been taken to only include one spelling for each
     word in any particular word list.  The word list included in Ispell
     by contrast only included support for American and British and also
     tends to included multiple spellings for a word which can mask some
     spelling errors.

1.1.1.2 Things that, currently, only Ispell has
...............................................

   • Lower memory footprint

   • Ability to deal with arbitrary multi-character letters such as old
     ASCII encodings of accented letters.

   • Perhaps better support for spell checking (La)TeX files.

For a detailed description of how Aspell differs from Ispell, *Note
Differences From Ispell::.

1.1.2 Comparison to Hunspell
----------------------------

Hunspell is based on Myspell.  Myspell was created as a simple spell
checker for use in OpenOffice.  Myspell’s affix support was merged into
Aspell 0.60 so Hunspell and Aspell can use the same affix file to some
extent.

Hunspell has better support for language peculiarities including
compounding and complex morphology.  However the Hunspell (v1.7.0)
utility currently has problems with apostrophe (‘'’) in words.

Aspell generally has better suggestions for non-phonetic languages such
as English and French.  Aspell suggestion speed also tends to be
significantly faster than Hunspell.  For a compression of suggestion
quality and speed see <http://aspell.net/test/>.


File: aspell.info,  Node: Support,  Next: Basic Usage,  Prev: Introduction,  Up: Top

2 Support
*********

Support for Aspell can be found on the Aspell mailing lists.
Instructions for joining the various mailing lists (and an archive of
them) can be found off the Aspell home page at <http://aspell.net>.

Bug reports can also be submitted via GitHub at
<https://github.com/GNUAspell/aspell/>.


File: aspell.info,  Node: Basic Usage,  Next: Customizing Aspell,  Prev: Support,  Up: Top

3 Basic Usage
*************

For a quick reference on the Aspell utility use the command ‘aspell
--help’.

* Menu:

* Spellchecking Individual Files::  
* Using Aspell as a Replacement for Ispell::  
* Using Aspell with other Applications::  


File: aspell.info,  Node: Spellchecking Individual Files,  Next: Using Aspell as a Replacement for Ispell,  Up: Basic Usage

3.1 Spellchecking Individual Files
==================================

To use Aspell to spellcheck a file use:

     aspell check [OPTIONS] FILENAME

at the command line where ‘FILENAME’ is the file you want to check and
‘OPTIONS’ is any number of optional options.  Some of the more useful
ones include:

–mode=MODE
     the mode to use when checking files.  The available modes are
     ‘none’, ‘url’, ‘email’, ‘markdown’, ‘html’, ‘tex’, ‘texinfo’, and
     ‘nroff’, among others.  *Note Filter Options::.

–dont-backup
     don’t create a backup file.  Normally, if there are any corrections
     the Aspell utility will append ‘.bak’ to the existing file name and
     then create a new file with corrections made during spell checking.

–sug-mode=MODE
     the suggestion mode to use where mode is one of ‘ultra’, ‘fast’,
     ‘normal’, ‘slow’, or ‘bad-spellers’.  *Note Notes on the Different
     Suggestion Modes::.

–lang=NAME/-l NAME
     the language the document is written in.  The default depends on
     the current locale.

–encoding=NAME
     encoding the document is expected to be in.  The default depends on
     the current locale.

–master=NAME/-d NAME
     the main dictionary to use.

–keymapping=NAME
     the keymapping to use.  Either ‘aspell’ for the default mapping or
     ‘ispell’ to use the same mapping that the Ispell utility uses.

(For more information on the available options, please see *note
Customizing Aspell::.)

For example to check the file ‘foo.txt’:

     aspell check foo.txt

and to check the file ‘foo.txt’ using the ‘bad-spellers’ suggestion mode
and the American English dictionary:

     aspell check --sug-mode=bad-spellers -d en_US foo.txt

If the ‘mode’ option is not given, then Aspell will use the extension of
the file to determine the current mode.

If Aspell was compiled with curses support and the ‘TERM’ environment
variable is set to a capable terminal type then Aspell will use a nice
full screen interface, otherwise it will use a simpler “dumb” terminal
interface where the misspelled word is surrounded by two ’*’.  In either
case the interface should be self explanatory.

If Aspell is compiled with a version of the curses library that support
wide characters then Aspell can also check UTF-8 text.  Furthermore, the
document will be displayed in the encoding defined by the current
locale.  This encoding does not necessarily have to be the same encoding
that the document is in.  This means that is is possible to check an
8-bit encoding such as ISO-8859-1 on an UTF-8 terminal.  To do so simply
set the ‘encoding’ option to ‘iso-8859-1’.  Furthermore it is also
possible to check an UTF-8 document on an 8-bit terminal provided that
the document can be successfully converted into that encoding.


File: aspell.info,  Node: Using Aspell as a Replacement for Ispell,  Next: Using Aspell with other Applications,  Prev: Spellchecking Individual Files,  Up: Basic Usage

3.2 Using Aspell as a Replacement for Ispell
============================================

As of GNU Aspell 0.60.1 Aspell should be able to completely replace
Ispell for most applications.  The Ispell compatibility script should
work for most applications which expect Ispell.  However there are some
differences which you should be aware of.

3.2.1 As a Drop In Replacement
------------------------------

Aspell can be used as a drop in replacement for Ispell for programs that
use Ispell through a pipe such as Emacs and LyX. It can also be used
with programs that simply call the ‘ispell’ command and expect the
original file to be overwritten with the corrected version.

If you do not have Ispell installed on your system and have installed
the Ispell compatibility script then you should not need to do anything
as most applications that expect Ispell will work as expected with
Aspell via the Ispell compatibility script.

Otherwise, the recommended way to use Aspell as a replacement for Ispell
is to change the ‘ispell’ command from within the program being used.
If the program uses ‘ispell’ in pipe mode simply change ‘ispell’ to
‘aspell’.  If the program calls the ‘ispell’ command to check the file,
then change ‘ispell’ to ‘aspell check’.

If that is impossible then the ‘run-with-aspell’ script can be used.
This script modifies the path so that programs see the Ispell
compatibility script instead of the actual true ‘ispell’ command.  The
format of the script is:

     run-with-aspell COMMAND

where COMMAND is the name of the program with any optional arguments.

The old method of mapping Ispell to Aspell is discouraged because it can
create compatibility problems with programs that actually require Ispell
such as Ispell’s own scripts.

3.2.2 Differences From Ispell
-----------------------------

Nevertheless, Aspell is not Ispell, nor is it meant to completely
emulate the behavior of Ispell.  The ‘aspell’ command is not identical
to the ‘ispell’ command when not used in “pipe” mode.  If an application
expects the ‘ispell’ command, then the Ispell compatibility script
should be used instead.

3.2.2.1 Functionality of the Ispell Compatibility Script
........................................................

The Ispell compatibility script provides the following Ispell
functionally.

   • The ability to check a file when called without any mode
     parameters.

   • The pipe or -a mode.

   • The list or -l mode.

   • The version or -v mode.  A single line is returned which, while not
     being identical to the line Ispell returns, is sufficient to fool
     most programs.

   • The munch or -c mode.

   • The expand or -e mode.

   • The ability to dump the affix file when called with ’-D’.  However
     the format of the affix file is different.  Furthermore, not all
     languages have an affix file.

However the Ispell script is currently unable to emulate the ’-A’ pipe
mode.  This is different from the normal pipe mode in that the special
‘&Include_File&’ command is recognized.

3.2.2.2 Recognized Options
..........................

Aspell, and thus the Ispell compatibility script, recognizes most of the
options that Ispell uses except for the ’-S’, ’-w’ and ’-T’ options.
The Aspell command will simply ignore these options if it sees them.

3.2.2.3 Check Mode Compatibility
................................

The interface used by Aspell when checking individual files is slightly
different than Ispell’s.  In particular the default keymappings are not
the same as the ones Ispell uses.  However Aspell supports using the
Ispell keymappings via the ‘keymapping’ option.  To use the Ispell
keymappings set the ‘kepmapping’ option to ‘ispell’.  This can be done
on the command line by using the command:

     aspell check --keymapping=ispell …
or, when the Ispell compatible script is used:
     ispell --keymapping=ispell …

The Ispell keymapping can always be used when the Ispell compatibly
script is called by uncommenting the indicated line in the ‘ispell’
script.

3.2.2.4 Pipe Mode Compatibility
...............................

The Aspell pipe mode should be identical to the Ispell pipe mode except
if the line starts with a ’$$’ as that will trigger special Aspell only
commands or if the line starts with a ’~’ which is ignored by Aspell.

3.2.2.5 Other Differences
.........................

The compiled dictionary format is completely different than Ispell’s.
Furthermore the format of the language data files’ are different than
Ispell’s affix file.  However, all known Ispell dictionaries were
converted to Aspell format, except for Albanian (sq) as I was unable to
find the source word list.

The naming and format of the personal dictionary is also different.
However, Ispell personal dictionaries can be imported using the
‘aspell-import’ script.  *Note Using aspell-import::.  The Ispell
personal dictionary is simply a list of words while the Aspell one is a
list of words with a header line.  Thus it is also fairly easy to
convert between the two.  *Note Format of the Personal Dictionary::.

3.2.2.6 Missing Functionally
............................

The only major area where Ispell is superior to Aspell is in the
handling of multi character letters such as old ASCII encoding of
accented characters.

However, Aspell can handle UTF-8 documents far better than Ispell can.


File: aspell.info,  Node: Using Aspell with other Applications,  Prev: Using Aspell as a Replacement for Ispell,  Up: Basic Usage

3.3 Using Aspell with other Applications
========================================

3.3.1 With Enchant Based Applications
-------------------------------------

Enchant is a generic spell checking library with multiple backends used
by many applications that provide spell checker functionality.  Enchant
is used by AbiWord; LyX; and via gspell and GtkSpell, a number of Gtk
and GNOME applications.

By default enchant is configured to prefer Hunspell over Aspell but this
can easily be changed on a per-language basis.  If you wish to use
Aspell for a specific dictionary say, American English, make sure that
the Aspell backend is installed (on Debian and Ubuntu based system it is
included as part of the base package) then create the file
‘~/.config/enchant/enchant.ordering’ that contains the single line:

     en_US:aspell

To test it.  Restart the enchant based application and then compare the
suggestion list with an application that used Aspell or by using the
‘aspell check’ or ‘aspell pipe’ commands.

You can also prefer Aspell in general over Hunspell by instead using:

     *:aspell,hunspell

Then if an Aspell dictionary is available Enchant should use it.

3.3.2 With Emacs and XEmacs
---------------------------

Newer versions of Emacs should prefer ‘aspell’ over both ‘ispell’ and
‘hunspell’, if you find this is not the case, then adding the line:

(setq-default ispell-program-name "aspell")

to the end of your ‘.emacs’ file should convince Emacs to use Aspell.

3.3.3 With VIM
--------------

To use Aspell in VIM you simply need to add the following line to your
‘.vimrc’ file:

map ^T :w!<CR>:!aspell check %<CR>:e! %<CR>

I use ‘Ctrl-T’ since that’s the way you spell check in ‘pico’.  In order
to add a control character to your ‘.vimrc’ you must type ‘Ctrl-v’
first.  In this case ‘Ctrl-v Ctrl-t’.

A more useful way to use Aspell, IMHO, is in combination with Newsbody
(<http://www.image.dk/~byrial/newsbody/>) which is how I use it since
VIM is my editor for my mailer and my news reader.
map ^T\\1\\2<CR>:e! %<CR>
map \\1 :w!<CR>
map \\2 :!newsbody -qs -n % -p aspell check \\%f<CR>

3.3.4 With Pine
---------------

To use Aspell in Pine simply change the option ‘speller’ to

     aspell --mode=email check

To change the ‘speller’ option go to the main menu.  Type ‘S’ for
_setup_, ‘C’ for _config_, then ‘W’ for _where is_.  Type in ‘speller’
as the word to find.  The speller option should be highlighted now.  Hit
enter, type in the above line, and hit enter again.  Then type ‘E’ for
_exit setup_ and ‘Y’ to save the change.

If you have a strong desire to check other people’s comments change
‘speller’ to

     aspell check

instead which will avoid switching Aspell into email mode.


File: aspell.info,  Node: Customizing Aspell,  Next: Working With Dictionaries,  Prev: Basic Usage,  Up: Top

4 Customizing Aspell
********************

The behavior of Aspell can be changed by any number of options which can
be specified at either the command line, the environment variable
‘ASPELL_CONF’, a personal configuration file, or a global configuration
file.  Options specified on the command line override options specified
by the environment variable.  Options specified by the environment
variable override options specified by either of the configuration
files.  Finally options specified by the personal configuration file
override options specified in the global configuration file.  Options
specified in the environment variable ‘ASPELL_CONF’, a personal
configuration file, or a global configuration file will take effect no
matter how Aspell is used which includes being used by other
applications.

Aspell has three basic types of options: "boolean", "value", and "list".

"Boolean" options are either enabled or disabled, "value" options take a
specific value, and "list" options can either have entries added or
removed from the list.

* Menu:

* Specifying Options::          
* The Options::                 
* Dumping Configuration Values::  
* Notes on Various Options::    


File: aspell.info,  Node: Specifying Options,  Next: The Options,  Up: Customizing Aspell

4.1 Specifying Options
======================

4.1.1 At the Command Line
-------------------------

All options specified at the command line have the following basic
format:

     --OPTION[=VALUE]

where the ‘=’ can be replaced by whitespace.

Some options also have single letter abbreviations of the form:

     LETTER [OPTIONAL_WHITESPACE VALUE]

Any non-ASCII characters are expected to be in the encoding specified by
the current locale.

To reset an option to the default value, prefix the option with a
‘reset-’ and don’t specify a value.

4.1.1.1 Value options
.....................

To specify a value option simply specify the option with its
corresponding value.  For example to set the filter mode to TeX use
‘--mode=tex’.

If a value option has a single letter shortcut simply specify the single
letter shortcut with its corresponding value.  For example to use a the
accented version of the American English dictionary use ‘-d
en_US-w_accents’.

4.1.1.2 Boolean options
.......................

To enable a boolean option simply specify the option without any
corresponding value, or prefix it with an ‘enable-’.  For example to
create a backup file use ‘--backup’.  To disable a boolean option prefix
the option name with a ‘dont-’ or ‘disable-’.  To avoid creating a
backup file use ‘--dont-backup’.  Boolean options can also be set
directly like a value option where the value is either "true" or
"false", for example ‘--backup=true’.

If a boolean option has a single letter abbreviation simply give the
letter corresponding to either enabling or disabling the option without
any corresponding value.  For example, to consider run-together words
valid use ‘-C’ or to consider them invalid use ‘-B’

4.1.1.3 List options
....................

To add a value to the list, prefix the option name with an ‘add-’ and
then specify the value to add.  For example, to add the URL filter use
‘--add-filter url’.  To remove a value from a list option, prefix the
option name with a ‘rem-’ and then specify the value to remove.  For
example, to remove the URL filter use ‘--rem-filter url’.  To remove all
items from a list prefix the option name with a ‘clear-’ without specify
any value.  For example, to remove all filters use ‘--clear-filter’.

A list option can also be set directly, in which case it will be set to
a single value.  To directly set a list option to multiple values prefix
the option name with a ‘lset-’ and separate each value with a ‘:’.  For
example, to use the URL and TeX filter use ‘--lset-filter url:tex’.

4.1.2 Via a Configuration File
------------------------------

Aspell can also accept options via a personal or global configuration
file.  The exact files to used are specified by the options ‘per-conf’
and ‘conf’ respectively but the personal configuration file is normally
‘.aspell.conf’ located in the ‘HOME’ directory and the global one is
normally ‘aspell.conf’ which is located in the ‘etc’ directory which is
normally ‘/usr/etc’ or ‘/usr/local/etc’.  To find out the particular
values for your particular system use ‘aspell dump config’.

Each line of the configuration file has the format:

     OPTION [VALUE]

There may be any number of spaces between the option and the value
however it can only be spaces, i.e.  there is no ‘=’ between the option
name and the value and there are no preceding ‘--’ as used on the
command line.

Comments may also be included by preceding them with a ‘#’ as anything
from a ‘#’ to a newline is ignored.  Blank lines are also allowed.

To include a literal ‘#’ use ‘\#’.  To include a literal ‘\’ use ‘\\’.
Any other non-alpha character can also be protected by a ‘\’ if
necessary.

Any non-ASCII characters are expected to be in UTF-8.

To reset an option to the default value prefix the option with a
‘reset-’ and don’t specify a value.

Values set in the personal configuration file override those in the
global file.  Options specified at either the command line or via an
environment variable override those specified by either configuration
file.

     Note: Filters and corresponding options also may be assembled
     inside a special meta filter file named ‘METAFILTER.flt’.  A filter
     has to be loaded via adding a ‘add-filter FILTERNAME’ line to the
     meta filter file before its options may be specified.

4.1.2.1 Value options
.....................

To specify a value option simply include the option followed by the
corresponding value.  For example to set the default language to German
use ‘lang german’.

4.1.2.2 Boolean options
.......................

To specify a boolean option simply include the option followed by a
‘true’ to enable it or a ‘false’ to disable it.  For example to allow
run-together words use ‘run-together true’.

4.1.2.3 List options
....................

To add a value to the list, prefix the option name with an ‘add-’ and
then specify the value to add.  For example to add the URL filter use
‘add-filter url’.  To remove a value from a list option prefix the
option name with a ‘rem-’ and then specify the value to remove.  For
example, to remove the URL filter use ‘rem-filter url’.  To remove all
items from a list prefix the option name with a ‘clear-’ without
specifying any value.  For example, to remove all filters use
‘clear-filter’.

A list option can also be set directly, in which case it will be set to
a single value.  To directly set a list option to multiple values prefix
the option name with a ‘lset-’ and separate each value with a ‘:’.  For
example, to use the URL and TeX filter use ‘lset-filter url:tex’.  To
include a literal ‘:’ use ‘\:’.

4.1.3 Via an Environment Variable
---------------------------------

The environment variable ‘ASPELL_CONF’ may also be used and it overrides
any options set in the configuration file.  The format of the string is
exactly the same as the configuration file except that semicolons (‘;’)
are used instead of newlines.


File: aspell.info,  Node: The Options,  Next: Dumping Configuration Values,  Prev: Specifying Options,  Up: Customizing Aspell

4.2 The Options
===============

The following is a list of available options broken down by category.
Each entry has the following format:

     OPTION[,SINGLE-LETTER-ABBREVIATION]
          (TYPE) DESCRIPTION

Where single letter options are specified as they would appear at the
command line, ie with the preceding dash.  Boolean single letter options
are specified in the following format:

     -<abbreviation to enable>|-<abbreviation to disable>

OPTION is one of the following: _boolean_, _string_, _file_, _dir_,
_integer_, or _list_.

_String_, _file_, _dir_, and _integer_ types are all value options which
can only take a specific type of value.

4.2.1 Dictionary Options
------------------------

The following options may be used to control which dictionaries to use
and how they behave (for more information see *note How Aspell Selects
an Appropriate Dictionary::):

master,-d
     (string) Base name of the dictionary to use.  If this option is
     specified then Aspell will either use this dictionary or die.

dict-dir
     (dir) Location of the main word list.

lang
     (string) Language to use.  It follows the same format of the ‘LANG’
     environment variable on most systems.  It consists of the two
     letter ISO 639 language code and an optional two letter ISO 3166
     country code after a dash or underscore.  The default value is
     based on the value of the ‘LC_MESSAGES’ locale.

size
     (string) The preferred size of the word list.  This consists of a
     two char digit code describing the size of the list, with typical
     values of: 10=tiny, 20=really small, 30=small, 40=med-small,
     50=med, 60=med-large, 70=large, 80=huge, 90=insane.

variety
     (list) Any extra information to distinguish two different words
     lists that have the same lang and size.

word-list-path
     (list) Search path for word list information files.

personal,-p
     (file) Personal word list file name.

wordlists
     (list)

     UTF-8 files of additional words to accept.  Non-word characters
     will be removed from the start and end of each word and if the word
     is then considered valid for the current language it will be added.
     Otherwise it will be silently ignored.

     The ‘--dont-clean-words’ option can be used to prevent the removal
     of non-word characters.  The ‘--dont-skip-invalid-words’ can be
     used to try harder to accept the word; if a word contains a
     character that the language can’t handle it will still be ignored
     (for example a Cyrillic letter in a Latin based language).

     If words are not being added that you expect to, use the ‘aspell
     clean’ to find out why.

repl
     (file) Replacements list file name.

extra-dicts
     (list) Extra dictionaries to use.

dict-alias
     (list) create dictionary aliases.  Each entry has the form ‘FROM
     TO’.  Will override any system dictionaries that are present.

dont-use-other-dicts
     (boolean)

     Disable use of personal, replacement & session dictionaries.  Any
     dictionaries specified using ‘extra-dicts’ will still be used.

4.2.2 Encoding Options
----------------------

These options control the encoding the document is expected to be in and
how it is displayed.

encoding
     (string) The encoding the input text is in.  Valid values include,
     but not limited to, ‘iso-8859-*’, ‘utf-8’, ‘ucs-2’, ‘ucs-4’.  When
     using the Aspell utility the default encoding is based on the
     current locale.  Thus if your locale currently uses the ‘utf-8’
     encoding than everything will be in UTF-8.  The ‘ucs-2’ and ‘ucs-4’
     encodings are intended to be used by other programs using the
     Aspell library and is not supported by the Aspell utility.

normalize
     (boolean) Perform Unicode normalization.  Enabled by default.

norm-strict
     (boolean) Avoid lossy conversions when normalizing.  Lossy
     conversions includes compatibility mappings such as splitting the
     letter ‘OE’ (U+152) into ‘O’ and ‘E’ (when the combined letter is
     not available), and mappings which will remove accents.  Disabled
     by default except when creating dictionaries.

norm-form
     (string) The normalization form the output should be in.  This
     option primarily effects the normalization form of the suggestions
     as when spell checkering as the actual text is unchanged unless
     there is an error.  Valid values are ‘none’, ‘nfd’ for fully
     decomposition (Normalization Form D), ‘nfc’ for Normalization Form
     C, or ‘comp’ for fully composed.  ‘comp’ is like ‘nfc’ except that
     _full_ composition is used rather than _canonical_ composition.
     The ‘normalize’ option must be enabled for this option to be used.

norm-required
     (boolean) Set to true when the current language requires Unicode
     normalization.  This is generally the case when private use
     characters are used internally by Aspell or when Normalization Form
     C is not the same as full composition.

4.2.3 Checker Options
---------------------

These options control the behavior of Aspell when checking documents.

ignore,-W
     (integer) Ignore words with N characters or less

ignore-repl
     (boolean) Ignore commands to store replacement pairs.

save-repl
     (boolean) Save the replacement word list on save all.

keyboard
     (file) The base name of the keyboard definition file to use (*note
     Notes on Typo-Analysis::)

sug-mode
     (mode) Suggestion mode = ‘ultra’ | ‘fast’ | ‘normal’ | ‘slow’ |
     ‘bad-spellers’ (*note Notes on the Different Suggestion Modes::)

sug-split-char
     (list) Characters to use when a word into two in the suggestion
     list.  Setting this option to the empty list disables word
     splitting.

ignore-case
     (boolean) Ignore case when checking words.

ignore-accents
     (boolean) Ignore accents when checking words – _currently ignored_.

4.2.4 Filter Options
--------------------

These options control Aspell’s filters that filter out text that should
not be spell checked.

mode
     (string) Sets the filter mode.  A mode is a collection of
     individual filters that work well together.  Possible values
     include, but not limited to, ‘none’, ‘url’ (the normal default),
     ‘email’, ‘markdown’, ‘html’, ‘tex’, ‘texinfo’, or ‘nroff’ (default
     for ‘aspell pipe’).  For a complete list use ‘aspell dump modes’.

     The shortcut options ‘-e’ may be used for email, ‘-H’ for HTML,
     ‘-M’ for Markdown, ‘-t’ for TeX, or ‘-n’ for Nroff.

filter
     (list) Individual filters to use, use ‘aspell dump filters’ for a
     complete list.

filter-path
     (list) Where to look when loading filter and filter modes.

4.2.4.1 None filter mode
........................

The ‘none’ mode is exactly what it says.  It turns off all filters.

4.2.4.2 URL filter
..................

The ‘url’ filter/mode skips over URLs, host names, and email addresses.
Because this filter is almost always useful and rarely does any harm it
is enabled in all modes except ‘none’.  To turn it off either select the
‘none’ mode or use ‘rem-filter’ option _after_ the desired mode is
selected.

4.2.4.3 Email filter
....................

The ‘email’ mode skips over quoted text.

email-quote
     (list) Email quote characters.  Defaults to ‘>’ and ‘|’.

email-margin
     (integer) The number of characters that can appear before the quote
     character.  Defaults to 10.

4.2.4.4 Markdown Filter
.......................

The ‘markdown’ filter/mode skips over code and links in Markdown
documents.  The mode also handles HTML via the ‘html’ filter which runs
after the Markdown filter.

Properly parsing Markdown requires reading the entire document in at
once, which doesn’t fit well into the existing filter framework so the
filter parses the document a line at a time and makes a best guess when
a line ends without enough information to correctly parse a tag.  For
example in the following:
     `This looks like inline code

     But it's not, because of the blank line.
the first line will be incorrectly skipped.

markdown-multiline-tags
     (boolean) Enables or disables support for HTML tags that might span
     multiple lines (outside of HTML blocks).  Enabled by default (to
     disable from the command line use
     ‘--dont-markdown-multiline-tags’).

markdown-skip-ref-labels
     (boolean) Controls if ref labels are skipped.  For example, when
     this option is enabled ‘[ref]’ will be skipped over in:
          [link][ref]

          [ref]: #c2 "Chapter 2"
     Enabled by default (to disable from the command line use
     ‘--dont-markdown-skip-ref-labels’).

The Markdown filter also supports the ‘markdown-raw-start-tags’ and
‘markdown-block-start-tags’ list options.  These options are a list of
HTML tags that start an HTML block.  If the block starts with a tag
listed in ‘markdown-raw-start-tags’ then the block ends with the
corresponding closing tag.  If the block starts with a tag listed in
‘markdown-block-start-tags’ then the block ends with a blank line.  The
defaults for these two options are taken from the CommonMark spec
(version 0.29, 2019-04-06).

4.2.4.5 SGML filter
...................

The SGML filter allows you to spell check SGML, HTML, XHTML, and XML
files.  In most cases everything within a tag ‘<tag attrib=value
attrib2="a whole sentence">’ will be skipped by the spell checker.  The
SGML/HTML/XML that Aspell supports is a slight superset of most DTDs
(Document Type Definitions) and can spell check the often non-conforming
HTML found on the web.

This filter will also translate SGML characters of the form ‘&#num;’.
Other SGML characters such as ‘&amp;’ will simply be skipped over so
that the word ‘amp’, for example, will not be spell checked.  Eventually
full support for properly translating SGML characters will be added.

sgml-skip
     (list) tags whose contents will also be skipped by the spell
     checker.  For example, if you wish to leave a misspelling in a
     document and not have them flagged as misspellings, you could
     surround them with a <nospellcheck> tag:
            <TD><FONT size=2><NOSPELLCHECK>leviosa</NOSPELLCHECK>
            is what Mr. Potter said</FONT></TD>
     And put that word in the skip config directive:
          add-sgml-skip nospellcheck

sgml-check
     (list) attributes whose values you do want spell checked.  By
     default, ’alt’ (<img> alternate text) is a member of the check list
     since it is text that is seen by a web page viewer.  You may also
     want ’value’ to be on the check list since that is the text put on
     buttons:
          add-sgml-check value
     In this case ‘<input type=button value="Donr">’ will be flagged as
     a misspelling.

4.2.4.6 HTML filter
...................

The ‘html’ filter is like the SGML filter but specialized for HTML.

html-check
     (list) HTML attributes to always check, such as alt= (alternate
     text).

html-skip
     (list) HTML tags to always skip the contents of, such as <script>.
     Defaults to ’script’ and ’style’.

4.2.4.7 TeX/LaTeX Filter
........................

The ‘tex’ (all lowercase) filter hides TeX/LaTeX commands and
corresponding parameters that are not readable text in the output from
Aspell.  It also skips over TeX comments by default.

tex-command
     (list) Controls which TeX commands should have certain parameters
     and/or options also skipped over.  Commands that are not specified
     will have all their parameters and/or options checked.  The format
     for each item is

          <command> <a list of p,P,o and Os>

     The first item is simply the command name.  The second item
     controls which parameters to skip over.  A ’p’ skips over a
     parameter while a ’P’ doesn’t.  Similarly an ’o’ will skip over an
     optional parameter while an ’O’ doesn’t.  The first letter on the
     list will apply to the first parameter, the second letter will
     apply to the second parameter etc.  If there are more parameters
     than letters Aspell will simply check them as normal.  For example
     the option

          add-tex-command rule pp

     will skip over the first two parameters of the ‘rule’ command while
     the option

          add-tex-command foo Pop

     will _check_ the first parameter of the ‘foo’ command, skip over
     the next optional parameter, if it is present, and will skip over
     the second parameter — even if the optional parameter is not
     present — and will check any additional parameters.

     A ‘*’ at the end of the command is simply ignored.  For example the
     option

          add-tex-command enlargethispage p

     will ignore the first parameter in both ‘enlargethispage’ and
     ‘enlargethispage*’.

     The defaults are designed to work well with typical LaTeX
     documents.  Use ‘aspell --reset-tex-command config tex-command’ for
     the current defaults.

tex-check-comments
     (boolean) Check TeX comments.  Defaults to false.

4.2.4.8 Texinfo Filter
......................

The ‘texinfo’ filter allows you to spell check Texinfo files.  It will
skip over Texinfo commands and their parameters when appropriate.  It
will also skip over some Texinfo environments such as ‘example’.

The Texinfo filter has special code to deal with the ‘@table’ and
related commands.  It will apply the formatting command to each of the
‘@item’ or ‘@itemx’ commands just like Texinfo will.  This means that if
the formatting command is ‘@code’ and and the ‘@code’ command is a
member of the ‘texinfo-ignore’ option than the Texinfo filter will
ignore the parameter of the ‘@item’ command as if the parameter was also
the parameter of the ‘@code’ command.

The Texinfo filter will also skip over the ‘\input texinfo’ line.

texinfo-ignore
     (list) Texinfo command to ignore the parameters of.

texinfo-ignore-env
     (list) Texinfo environments to ignore.

4.2.4.9 Nroff Filter
....................

The ‘nroff’ filter mode allows you to check the spelling of Nroff
documents.  It is enabled by default when ‘aspell pipe’ is used.  When
checking documents with ‘aspell check’ it is automatically enabled if
the first three characters of the file being checked are ‘.\"’ (a
‘nroff’ comment marker) or the file name ends in a one of the following
suffixes:

   • single decimal digit from ‘0’ to ‘9’
   • letter ‘n’
   • ‘tmac’

This filter mode skips following ‘nroff’ language elements:

   • Comments
   • Requests
   • Names of ‘nroff’ registers (both traditional two-letter names and
     GNU nroff long names)
   • Arguments to the following requests: ‘ds’, ‘de’, ‘nr’, ‘do’, ‘so’.
   • Arguments to font switch (‘\f’) and size switch (‘\s’) escapes
   • Arguments to extended charset escape in both traditional (‘\(’) and
     extended (‘\[comp1 comp2 …]’) form.

4.2.4.10 Context Filter
.......................

The ‘context’ filter can be used to spell check source codes, HTML
sources and other texts which consist of different contexts.  Because
this filter is meant to build other filter modes, there is no ‘context’
mode.

The filter distinguishes between visible and invisible contexts.  The
visible ones will be spell checked and the invisible ones will be
ignored.

context-visible-first
     (boolean) Switches the context which should be visible to Aspell.
     When false (the default) the initial context is hidden and only
     delimited ones are visible.  When true the initial context is
     visible while the delimited ones are hidden.

context-delimiters
     (list) The context delimiters specified as a space separated pairs.
     To indicate that a context is always closed by end of line use ‘\0’
     sequence as closing delimiter.  For example the defaults (for
     historical reasons) are:
            add-context-delimiters /* */
            add-context-delimiters // \0
            add-context-delimiters " "
     which (when ‘context-visible-first’ is false) spell check C/C++
     comments and string literals.

4.2.4.11 Ccpp Filter Mode
.........................

The ‘ccpp’ filter mode is a context filter that will limit spell
checking to C/C++ comments and string literals.  Any code in between
will be left alone.

4.2.5 Compound Word Options
---------------------------

These may be used to control the behavior of compound words (for more
information *note Controlling the Behavior of Compound Words::):

run-together,-C|-B
     (boolean) consider run-together words valid

run-together-limit
     (integer) maximum number of words that can be strung together

run-together-min
     (integer) minimal length of interior words

camel-case
     (boolean) consider camelCase words valid

4.2.6 Miscellaneous Options
---------------------------

Miscellaneous other options that don’t fall under any other category

conf
     (file) Main configuration file.  This file overrides Aspell’s
     global defaults.

conf-dir
     (dir) location of main configuration file

data-dir
     (dir) location of language data files

local-data-dir
     (dir) alternative location of language data files.  This directory
     is searched before ‘data-dir’.  It defaults to the same directory
     the actual main word list is in (which is not necessarily
     ‘dict-dir’)

home-dir
     (dir) location for personal files

per-conf
     (file) personal configuration file.  This file overrides options
     found in the global ‘conf’ file

keyboard
     (file) use this keyboard layout for suggesting possible words.
     These spelling errors happen if a user accidental presses a key
     next to the intended correct key.  The default is keyboard
     standard.  If you are creating documents, you may want to set it
     according to your particular type of keyboard.  If spellchecking
     documents created elsewhere, you might want to set this to the
     keyboard type for that locale.  If you are not sure, just leave
     this as standard

prefix
     (dir) prefix directory

set-prefix
     (boolean) set the prefix based on executable location (only works
     on WIN32 and when compiled with ‘--enable-win32-relocatable’)

4.2.7 Aspell Utility Options
----------------------------

backup,-b|-x
     (boolean) Create a backup file by appending ‘.bak’ to the file
     name.  This applies when the command is ‘check’ and the backup file
     is only created if any spelling modifications take place.

time
     (boolean) Time load time and suggest time in ‘pipe’ mode.

byte-offsets
     (boolean) Use byte offsets instead of character offsets in ‘pipe’
     mode.

reverse
     (boolean) Reverse the order of the suggestions list in ‘pipe’ mode.

keymapping
     (string) the keymapping to use.  Either ‘aspell’ for the default
     mapping or ‘ispell’ to use the same mapping that the Ispell utility
     uses.

guess
     (boolean) make possible root/affix combinations not in the
     dictionary in ‘pipe’ mode.

suggest
     (boolean) Suggest possible replacements in ‘pipe’ mode.  If false
     Aspell will simply report the misspelling and make no attempt at
     suggestions or possible corrections.


File: aspell.info,  Node: Dumping Configuration Values,  Next: Notes on Various Options,  Prev: The Options,  Up: Customizing Aspell

4.3 Dumping Configuration Values
================================

To find out the current value of all the options use the command ‘aspell
dump config’.  This will dump the current Aspell configuration to
standard output.  The format of the contents dumped is such that it can
be used as either the global or your personal configuration file.

To find out the current value of a particular option use ‘aspell config
OPTION’.  This will print out the value of OPTION to standard output and
nothing else.

To determine the default setting for a particular option use ‘aspell
--reset-OPTION config OPTION’.


File: aspell.info,  Node: Notes on Various Options,  Prev: Dumping Configuration Values,  Up: Customizing Aspell

4.4 Notes on Various Options
============================

* Menu:

* Notes on Various Filters and Filter Modes::  
* Notes on the Prefix Option::  
* Notes on Typo-Analysis::      
* Notes on the Different Suggestion Modes::  


File: aspell.info,  Node: Notes on Various Filters and Filter Modes,  Next: Notes on the Prefix Option,  Up: Notes on Various Options

4.4.1 Notes on Various Filters and Filter Modes
-----------------------------------------------

This section was merged into *note Filter Options::.


File: aspell.info,  Node: Notes on the Prefix Option,  Next: Notes on Typo-Analysis,  Prev: Notes on Various Filters and Filter Modes,  Up: Notes on Various Options

4.4.2 Notes on the Prefix Option
--------------------------------

The ‘prefix’ option is there to allow Aspell to easily be relocated.
Changing ‘prefix’ will change all directory names relative to the new
prefix that are not explicitly set.  For example if ‘prefix’ was
‘/usr/local/aspell’ and ‘dict-dir’ has a default value of
‘/usr/local/aspell/dict’ than changing ‘prefix’ to ‘/opt/aspell’ will
also change the default value of ‘dict-dir’ to ‘/opt/aspell/dict’.  Note
that modifying ‘prefix’ will only affect the default compiled in values
of directories.  If a directory option is explicitly given a value then
changing the value of ‘prefix’ has no effect on that directory option.


File: aspell.info,  Node: Notes on Typo-Analysis,  Next: Notes on the Different Suggestion Modes,  Prev: Notes on the Prefix Option,  Up: Notes on Various Options

4.4.3 Notes on Typo-Analysis and the Keyboard Definition File
-------------------------------------------------------------

Aspell .33 and better will, in general, give a higher priority to
certain misspellings which are likely to be due to typos such as ‘teh’
instead of ‘the’ or ‘hapoy’ instead of ‘happy’.  However in order to do
this well Aspell needs to know the layout of the keyboard via the
keyboard definition file.  The keyboard definition file simply
identifies the keys on the keyboard and which of them are right next to
each other.  It has an extension of ‘.kbd’ and all non-ASCII characters
are expected to be in UTF-8.

To identify a key use:

     key BASE OTHER …

where BASE is the base character that the key types, and OTHER are other
keys that the key can produce.  For example

     key a A á Á

It generally is only necessary to list keys which type more than one
distinct letter as Aspell can derive the rest from the language data
file.  For example, it is not necessary to include the previously
mentioned key.

To identify two keys as being right next to each other simply list the
type keys right after each other.  For example the line:

     as

will indicate that ‘a’ and ‘s’ are right next to each other.  If ‘as’ is
listed as an entry it is not necessary to list ‘sa’ as an entry as that
will be done automatically.  Also by "right next to each other" I mean
two keys that are close enough together that it is easy to type one
instead of the other.

The default for this option is normally ‘standard’.  However the default
can be changed via the language data file.  The normal default,
‘standard’, should work well for most QWERTY like keyboard layouts.  It
may need minor adjusting for foreign keyboards.  A value of ‘dvorak’ can
be used for a Dvorak layout and ‘none’ can be used to avoid using an
explicit keyboard layout and only use the information derived from the
language data file.


File: aspell.info,  Node: Notes on the Different Suggestion Modes,  Prev: Notes on Typo-Analysis,  Up: Notes on Various Options

4.4.4 Notes on the Different Suggestion Modes
---------------------------------------------

In order to understand what these suggestion modes do, a basic
understanding of how Aspell works is required.  For that, see *note
Aspell Suggestion Strategy::.

To get a better idea of which mode you should chose here are some
results based on a small test kernel (see <http://aspell.net/test/cur>)
of misspelled/correct word pairs for GNU Aspell 0.60.8:

Mode           Score   First   1-10    Any     Time
------------------------------------------------------
ultra          70.4    53 %    74 %    75 %    0.49
fast           81.0    58 %    86 %    89 %    0.88
normal         82.6    59 %    88 %    91 %    1.00
slow           84.2    59 %    90 %    94 %    4.76
bad-spellers   82.3    55 %    86 %    98 %    7.46

The "Score" is a weighted average which gives more emphases to words
found earlier in the suggestion list.  "First", "1-10", and "Any" are
the percentage of times the correct word is found in the first, first
10, or anywhere in the suggestion list.  "Time" is the normalized
cpu-time.

The suggestion modes are as follows when soundslikes are used and affix
compression is not:

ultra
     This mode will use the fastest available method to come up with
     decent suggestions for common misspellings.  This currently means
     that it will look for words that are within one edit distance or
     have the same soundslike.  A replacement table will also be used if
     one is available.

fast
     This mode will use the fastest available method to come up with
     decent suggestions for not so common misspellings.  This currently
     means it will also look for soundslikes within one edit distance
     when compared to the ‘ultra’ mode.

normal
     This is the default mode and will use what ever method is necessary
     to return good suggestions, in most cases, and in a reasonable
     amount of time.  This currently means it will looks for soundslikes
     within two edit distance apart.

slow
     Like ‘normal’ except that “reasonable amount of time” is not a
     consideration.  In most cases it will return the same results as
     ‘normal’.  The biggest difference is that it will try an ngram scan
     if the normal methods of finding a suggestion fail.

bad-spellers
     This method is like ‘slow’ but is tailored more for the bad
     speller, where as the other modes are tailored more to strike a
     good balance between typos and true misspellings.  This mode never
     performs typo-analysis and returns a _huge_ number of words for the
     really bad spellers who can’t seem to get the spelling anything
     close to what it should be.  If the misspelled word looks anything
     like the correct spelling it is bound to be found _somewhere_ on
     the list of 100 or more suggestions.

When there is no soundslike or affix compression is used then the modes
have slightly different meanings but, with the exception of
‘bad-spellers’, lower modes are faster and higher modes give better
suggestions.  Some modes may give identical results depending on the
language configuration.


File: aspell.info,  Node: Working With Dictionaries,  Next: Writing programs to use Aspell,  Prev: Customizing Aspell,  Up: Top

5 Working With Dictionaries
***************************

* Menu:

* Using aspell-import::         
* How Aspell Selects an Appropriate Dictionary::  
* Listing Available Dictionaries::  
* Dumping the Contents of the Word List::  
* Creating an Individual Word List::  
* Working With Affix Info in Word Lists::  
* Format of the Personal and Replacement Dictionaries::  
* Using Multi Dictionaries::    
* Dictionary Naming::           
* AWLI files::                  


File: aspell.info,  Node: Using aspell-import,  Next: How Aspell Selects an Appropriate Dictionary,  Up: Working With Dictionaries

5.1 Using ‘aspell-import’
=========================

The ‘aspell-import’ Perl script will look for old personal dictionaries
and will import them into GNU Aspell.  It will look for both Ispell and
Aspell ones.  To use it, just run it from the command prompt.  If you
get an error about ‘/usr/bin/perl’ not being found, then instead try
‘perl BINDIR/aspell-import’.  When running the script if you get a
message like:

Error: No word lists can be found for the language "de".

This means that you have not installed support for the given language,
in this case ‘de’ for German.  To rectify the situation download and
install a dictionary designed to work with GNU Aspell 0.50 or better.


File: aspell.info,  Node: How Aspell Selects an Appropriate Dictionary,  Next: Listing Available Dictionaries,  Prev: Using aspell-import,  Up: Working With Dictionaries

5.2 How Aspell Selects an Appropriate Dictionary
================================================

If the ‘master’ option is set in any fashion (via the command line, the
‘ASPELL_CONF’ environment variable, or a configuration file) Aspell will
look for a dictionary of that name.  If one could not be found, it will
complain.

Otherwise it will use the value of the ‘lang’ option to search for an
appropriate dictionary.  If more than one dictionary is found for the
given language string then it will look for a dictionary with a matching
variety if the ‘variety’ option is set.  If it is not set it will look
for a dictionary without a variety.  If after matching the ‘lang’ and
‘variety’ there is still more than one dictionary available it will find
one with the size closest to the value of the ‘size’ option.  The
default size is 60.  If Aspell cannot find a dictionary based on the
‘lang’ option then it will give up and complain.

If the ‘lang’ option is not explicitly set its value will be based on
the ‘LC_MESSAGES’ locale.  This locale is generally taken from the
‘LC_MESSAGES’ environment variable or the ‘LANG’ environment variable if
‘LC_MESSAGES’ is not set.  However, if Aspell is being used as a library
from within another program which already explicitly set the locale then
it will use the locale of the library rather than the environment
variables.  If Aspell cannot determine the language from the
‘LC_MESSAGES’ locale than it will default to ‘en_US’.

The list option ‘dict-alias’ can be used to influence which dictionary
is selected by creating an alias from one dictionary name to another.
This option is most useful when there is more than one dictionary for a
given language.  For example ‘add-dict-alias en_US en_US-w_accents’ will
cause Aspell to choose the accented version of the American English
dictionary instead of the non-accented version.  To add an alias use:

     add-dict-alias NAME VAL


File: aspell.info,  Node: Listing Available Dictionaries,  Next: Dumping the Contents of the Word List,  Prev: How Aspell Selects an Appropriate Dictionary,  Up: Working With Dictionaries

5.3 Listing Available Dictionaries
==================================

For a list of available dictionaries use the command ‘aspell dump
dicts’.  This will form a list of dictionaries that Aspell will search
when a dictionary is not specifically given.


File: aspell.info,  Node: Dumping the Contents of the Word List,  Next: Creating an Individual Word List,  Prev: Listing Available Dictionaries,  Up: Working With Dictionaries

5.4 Dumping the Contents of the Word List
=========================================

The dump command in ‘aspell’ will simply dump the contents of a word
list to ‘stdout’ in a format that can be read back in with ‘aspell
create’.

If no word list is specified the command will act on the default one.
For example the command

     aspell dump personal

will simply dump the contents of the current personal word list to
‘stdout’.


File: aspell.info,  Node: Creating an Individual Word List,  Next: Working With Affix Info in Word Lists,  Prev: Dumping the Contents of the Word List,  Up: Working With Dictionaries

5.5 Creating an Individual Word List
====================================

To create an individual main word list from a list of words use the
command

     aspell --lang=LANG create master ./BASE < WORDLIST

where BASE is the name of the word list and WORDLIST is the list of
words separated by white space.  The name of the word list will
automatically be converted to all lowercase.  The ‘./’ is important
because without it Aspell will create the word list in the normal word
list directory.  If you are trying to create a word list in a language
other than English check the Aspell ‘data-dir’ (usually
‘/usr/share/aspell’, use ‘aspell dump config’ to find out what it is on
your system) to see if a language data file exists for your language.
If not you will need to create one.  For more information on using
Aspell with other languages *note Adding Support For Other Languages::.

This will create the file ‘BASE’ in the current directory.  To use the
new word list copy the file to the normal word list directory (use
‘aspell config’ to find out what it is) and use the option
‘--master=BASE’.

During the creating of the dictionary you may get a number of warnings
or errors about invalid words or affixes.  By default Aspell will skip
any invalid words and remove invalid affixes.  If you rather that Aspell
simply accepts all words given then the option ‘--dont-validate-words’
can be specified.  To avoid checking if affixes are valid use the option
‘--dont-validate-affixes’.  However, rather than disable checking, it is
preferable to clean the input word list.  This can be done by using the
command

     aspell --local-data-dir=./ --lang=LANG clean < WORDLIST > RESULT

which will clean the word list and output the results to RESULT.  By
default it will remove invalid characters from the beginning and end of
a word before resorting to skipping the word.  If you rather it just
skip the words than add the keyword strict:

     aspell --local-data-dir=./ --lang=LANG clean strict < WORDLIST > RESULT

The option ‘--clean-words’ can be be added when creating a dictionary if
you want Aspell to remove invalid characters from the beginning and end
of a word like the "clean" command does.  In addition the options
‘--dont-skip-invalid-words’ and ‘--dont-clean-affixes’ can be specified
to turn the warnings into errors.

The compiled dictionaries are platform dependent.  They depend on the
endian order and (unless compiled with the ‘--enable-32-bit-hash-fun’
option) the size of the ‘size_t’ type as it used in the hash function;
this type is generally different on 32 and 64-bit systems.  When a
dictionary is loaded the endian order and compatibility of the hash
function is checked.  Please do not distribute the compiled dictionaries
unless you are only distributing them for a particular platform such as
you would a binary.

Aspell is now also able to use special ‘multi’ dictionaries.  for more
information *note How Aspell Selects an Appropriate Dictionary::.

A personal and replacement word list can be created in a similar
fashion.

5.5.1 Format of the Replacement Word List
-----------------------------------------

The replacement word list has each replacement pair on its own line in
the following format

     misspelled_word correction


File: aspell.info,  Node: Working With Affix Info in Word Lists,  Next: Format of the Personal and Replacement Dictionaries,  Prev: Creating an Individual Word List,  Up: Working With Dictionaries

5.6 Working With Affix Info in Word Lists
=========================================

5.6.1 The Munch Command
-----------------------

The ‘munch’ command takes a list of words from standard input and
outputs a list of possible root words and affixes.  The root may,
however, be invalid as it does not check them against the existing
dictionary.  For example the command:
     echo brother | aspell -l en munch
produces
     brother broth/R brothe/R

5.6.2 The Expand Command
------------------------

The ‘expand’ command is the reverse of ‘munch’, it expands affix flags
to produce a list of words.  For example:
     echo both/R | aspell -l en expand
produces
     both bother

The formal usage is:
     aspell expand [LEVEL] [LIMIT]
Where LEVEL is the expansion level.  Valid values are between 1 and 3.
Level 1 is the default if not otherwise specified.  Level 2 causes the
original root/affix to be included, for example:
     both/R both bother
Level 3 causes multiple lines to be printed, one for each generated
word, with the original root/affix combination followed by the word it
creates:
     both/R both
     both/R bother
Levels larger than 3 may also be supported, but should not be used as
they may eventually be removed.

If a LIMIT parameter is given then only expansions which affect the
first LIMIT letters will be expanded.  If a base word is not completely
expanded for a given affix flag that flag will be left on the word.
Note that prefixes are always expanded.

5.6.3 The Munch-list Command
----------------------------

The ‘munch-list’ command will reduce the size of word list via affix
compression.  It will reduce a list of words to a minimal (or close to
it) set of roots and affixes that will match the same list of words.
The list of words is read from standard input and the result, the
“munched” list, is written to standard out.  It’s usage is:

     aspell munch-list [keep] [single|multi] [simple] < INFILE > OUTFILE

where ‘simple’, ‘single’, ‘multi’, and ‘keep’ are literal values.

The default algorithm used should give near optimum results.  In some
cases the set of words returned is, provably, the minimum number
possible.  In the typical case the number of words returned is within 1%
of the optimum number.

By default Aspell will remove redundant affix flags.  The ‘keep’ flag
will avoid removing them, which can be useful if you want to include all
possible expansions for each base word.

When cross products are involved it may be beneficial to list a base
word more than once.  Unfortunately, the current version of Aspell can
not correctly handle multiple base words in a dictionary.  Therefore,
the current default behavior is to only include the one with the most
expansions.  All of them can be included via the ‘multi’ flag.  Once
Aspell is able to handle multiple base words the default will be to
include them all.  The ‘single’ flag can be used to only include one of
them.

The ‘simple’ flag will select an alternate faster algorithm.  This
algorithm is very similar to the ‘munch’ command distributed with
MySpell (the Open Office spell checker), however, it doesn’t give nearly
as good results.  It does okay for the English word list but not for
some other languages such as German; the normal algorithm reduced a list
of 312,002 German words to 79,420 base words while the simple algorithm
only reduced it to 115,927 words.  This algorithm may disappear in a
future version of Aspell.


File: aspell.info,  Node: Format of the Personal and Replacement Dictionaries,  Next: Using Multi Dictionaries,  Prev: Working With Affix Info in Word Lists,  Up: Working With Dictionaries

5.7 Format of the Personal and Replacement Dictionaries
=======================================================

5.7.1 Format of the Personal Dictionary
---------------------------------------

The personal dictionary generally has a filename of the form:

     .aspell.LANG.pws

And the file itself contains two parts.  The first part is a header line
of the form:

     personal_ws-1.1 LANG NUM [ENCODING]

where NUM is the number of words in the list.  This number is only used
as a hint, and thus does not have to be accurate.  When creating a new
dictionary it is perfectly acceptable for NUM to be 0.  The ENCODING is
optional and specifies the encoding of the word list.  If it is left out
the encoding is expected to be in the default encoding for the language
as specified by the ‘data-encoding’ option.  *Note data-encoding::.

The second part of simply a word list with one word per line.

5.7.2 Format of the Personal Replacement Dictionary
---------------------------------------------------

The personal replacement dictionary generally has a filename of the
form:

     .aspell.LANG.prepl

And the file itself contains two parts.  The first part is a header line
of the form:

     personal_repl-1.1 LANG NUM [ENCODING]

where NUM is currently unused and thus always 0.  As with the personal
dictionary the ENCODING is optional.

The second part simply a list of replacements with one replacement per
line with each replacement pair has the following format:

     MISSPELLED_WORD CORRECTION


File: aspell.info,  Node: Using Multi Dictionaries,  Next: Dictionary Naming,  Prev: Format of the Personal and Replacement Dictionaries,  Up: Working With Dictionaries

5.8 Using Multi Dictionaries
============================

As with previous versions of Aspell you can specify the main dictionary
to use via the ‘-d’ or ‘--master’ option.  However as of Aspell .32 you
can now also:

  1. Specify more than word list to use with the ‘extra-dicts’ option.

  2. Specify special _multi_ dictionaries.

The ‘extra-dicts’ is a list option.  To add a dictionary use
‘add-extra-dicts’ or to remove a dictionary from the list use
‘rem-extra-dicts’.

A _multi_ dictionary is a special file which is basically a list of
dictionary files to use.  A _multi_ dictionary must end in ‘.multi’ and
has roughly the same format as a configuration file with the only
accepted key being ‘add’.


File: aspell.info,  Node: Dictionary Naming,  Next: AWLI files,  Prev: Using Multi Dictionaries,  Up: Working With Dictionaries

5.9 Dictionary Naming
=====================

In order for Aspell to be able to correctly recognize a dictionary based
on the setting of the ‘LANG’ environment variable the dictionaries need
to be located somewhere Aspell can find them and they need to be _multi_
dictionaries.  Where Aspell looks for dictionaries depends on the value
of the ‘dict-dir’ and ‘word-list-path’ option.

‘dict-dir’ is generally ‘PREFIX/lib/aspell’, and ‘word-list-path’ is
generally empty.

Each dictionary that you expect Aspell to be able to find needs to have
a name in the following format:

     LANGUAGE[_REGION][-VARIETY][-SIZE].multi

where LANGUAGE is the two letter language code, REGION is the two letter
region code, VARIETY is any extra information to distinguish the word
list from other ones with the same language and spelling.  Multiple
varieties can be used by separating them with a ’-’.  Finally, SIZE is
the size of the dictionary.  If no size is specified then the default
size of 60 will be assumed.

For example:

     en.multi
     en_US.multi
     en-medical.multi
     en-medical-85.multi
     en-85.multi
     de.multi


File: aspell.info,  Node: AWLI files,  Prev: Dictionary Naming,  Up: Working With Dictionaries

5.10 AWLI files
===============

In order for Aspell to find dictionaries that are located in odd places
or not named according to *note Dictionary Naming::, an AWLI file needs
to be created for the dictionary and located in some place where Aspell
can find it.

Each AWLI file has a name in the following format:

     LANGUAGE[REGION][-VARIETY][-SIZE]-MODULE.awli

where the names have the same meaning as in *note Dictionary Naming::,
and MODULE is the speller module to use, which should be set to DEFAULT
for now since there is only one speller module.

Each ‘awli’ file for an Aspell word list should then contain exactly one
line which contains the full path of the main word list.


File: aspell.info,  Node: Writing programs to use Aspell,  Next: Adding Support For Other Languages,  Prev: Working With Dictionaries,  Up: Top

6 Writing programs to use Aspell
********************************

There are two main ways to use Aspell from within your application.
Through the external C API or through a pipe.  The internal Aspell API
can be used directly but that is not recommended as the actual Aspell
API is constantly changing.

* Menu:

* Through the C API::           
* Through A Pipe::              
* Notes on Storing Replacement Pairs::  


File: aspell.info,  Node: Through the C API,  Next: Through A Pipe,  Up: Writing programs to use Aspell

6.1 Through the C API
=====================

The Aspell library contains two main classes and several helper classes.
The two main classes are ‘AspellConfig’ and ‘AspellSpeller’.  The
‘AspellConfig’ class is used to set initial defaults and to change spell
checker specific options.  The ‘AspellSpeller’ class does most of the
real work.  The ‘C API’ is responsible for managing the dictionaries,
checking if a word is in the dictionary, and coming up with suggestions
among other things.  There are many helper classes the important ones
are ‘AspellWordList’, ‘AspellMutableWordList’, ‘Aspell*Enumeration’.
The ‘AspellWordList’ classes is used for accessing the suggestion list,
as well as the personal and suggestion word list currently in use.  The
‘AspellMutableWordList’ is used to manage the personal, and perhaps
other, word lists.  The ‘Aspell*Enumeration’ classes are used for
iterating through a list.

6.1.1 Usage
-----------

To use Aspell your application should include ‘aspell.h’.  In order to
ensure that all the necessary libraries are linked in libtool should be
used to perform the linking.  When using libtool simply linking with
‘-laspell’ should be all that is necessary.  When using shared libraries
you might be able to simply link ‘-laspell’, but this is not
recommended.  This version of Aspell uses the CVS version of libtool
however released versions of libtool should also work.

When your application first starts you should get a new configuration
class with the command:

     AspellConfig * spell_config = new_aspell_config();

which will create a new ‘AspellConfig’ class.  It is allocated with
‘new’ and it is your responsibility to delete it with
‘delete_aspell_config’.  Once you have the config class you should set
some variables.  The most important one is the language variable.  To do
so use the command:

     aspell_config_replace(spell_config, "lang", "en_US");

which will set the default language to use to American English.  The
language is expected to be the standard two letter ISO 639 language
code, with an optional two letter ISO 3166 country code after an
underscore.  You can set the preferred size via the ‘size’ option, any
extra info via the ‘variety’ option, and the encoding via the ‘encoding’
option.  Other things you might want to set is the preferred spell
checker to use, the search path for dictionaries, and the like — see
*note The Options::, for a list of all available options.

Whenever a new document is created a new ‘AspellSpeller’ class should
also be created.  There should be one speller class per document.  To
create a new speller class use the ‘new_aspell_speller’ and then cast it
up using ‘to_aspell_speller’ like so:

     AspellCanHaveError * possible_err = new_aspell_speller(spell_config);
     AspellSpeller * spell_checker = 0;
     if (aspell_error_number(possible_err) != 0)
       puts(aspell_error_message(possible_err));
     else
       spell_checker = to_aspell_speller(possible_err);

which will create a new ‘AspellSpeller’ class using the defaults found
in ‘spell_config’.  To find out which dictionary is selected the ‘lang’,
‘size’, and ‘variety’ options may be examined.  To find out the exact
name of the dictionary the ‘master’ option may be examined as well as
the ‘master-flags’ options to see if there were any special flags that
were passed on to the module.  The ‘module’ option way also be examined
to figure out which speller module was selected, but since there is only
one this option will always be the same.

If for some reason you want to use different defaults simply clone
‘spell_config’ and change the setting like so:

     AspellConfig * spell_config2 = aspell_config_clone(spell_config);
     aspell_config_replace(spell_config2, "lang","nl");
     possible_err = new_aspell_speller(spell_config2);
     delete_aspell_config(spell_config2);

Once the speller class is created you can use the ‘check’ method to see
if a word in the document is correct like so:

     int correct = aspell_speller_check(spell_checker, WORD, SIZE);

WORD is expected to be a ‘const char *’ character string.  SIZE is the
length of the string or ‘-1’ if the string is null terminated.
‘aspell_speller_check’ will return ‘0’ if it is not found and non-zero
otherwise.

If you are using the ‘ucs-2’ or ‘ucs-4’ encoding then the string is
expected to be either a 2 or 4 byte wide integer (respectively) and the
‘_w’ macro version should be used:

     int correct = aspell_speller_check_w(spell_checker, WORD, SIZE);

The macro will cast the string to to the correct type and convert SIZE
into bytes for you and then a call the special wide version of the
function that will make sure the encoding is correct for the type passed
in.  For compatibility with older versions of Aspell the normal non-wide
functions can still be used provided that the size of the string, in
bytes, is also passed in.  Null terminated ‘ucs-2’ or ‘ucs-4’ are no
longer supported when using the non-wide functions.

If the word is not correct, then the ‘suggest’ method can be used to
come up with likely replacements.

     AspellWordList * suggestions = aspell_speller_suggest(spell_checker,
                                                           WORD, SIZE);
     AspellStringEnumeration * elements = aspell_word_list_elements(suggestions);
     const char * word;
     while ( (word = aspell_string_enumeration_next(aspell_elements)) != NULL )
     {
       // add to suggestion list
     }
     delete_aspell_string_enumeration(elements);

Notice how ‘elements’ is deleted but ‘suggestions’ is not.  The value
returned by ‘suggestions’ is only valid to the next call to ‘suggest’.

If you are using the ‘ucs-2’ or ‘ucs-4’ encoding then, in addition to
using the ‘_w’ macro for the ‘suggest’ method, you should also use the
‘_w’ macro with the ‘next’ method which will cast the string to the
correct type for you.  For example, if you are using the ‘ucs-2’
encoding and the string is a ‘const uint16_t *’ then you should use:

     AspellWordList * suggestions = aspell_speller_suggest_w(spell_checker,
                                                             WORD, SIZE);
     AspellStringEnumeration * elements = aspell_word_list_elements(suggestions);
     const uint16_t * word;
     while ( (word = aspell_string_enumeration_next_w(uint16_t, aspell_elements)) != NULL )
     {
       // add to suggestion list
     }
     delete_aspell_string_enumeration(elements);

Once a replacement is made the ‘store_repl’ method should be used to
communicate the replacement pair back to the spell checker (for the
reason, *note Notes on Storing Replacement Pairs::).  Its usage is as
follows:

     aspell_speller_store_repl(spell_checker, MISSPELLED_WORD, SIZE,
                               CORRECTLY_SPELLED_WORD, SIZE);

If the user decided to add the word to the session or personal
dictionary the the word can be be added using the ‘add_to_session’ or
‘add_to_personal’ methods respectively like so:

     aspell_speller_add_to_session|personal(spell_checker, word, size);

It is better to let the spell checker manage these words rather than
doing it yourself so that the words have a chance of appearing in the
suggestion list.

Finally, when the document is closed the ‘AspellSpeller’ class should be
deleted like so:

     delete_aspell_speller(spell_checker);

6.1.2 API Reference
-------------------

Methods that return a boolean result generally return ‘false’ on error
and ‘true’ otherwise.  To find out what went wrong use the
‘error_number’ and ‘error_message’ methods.  Unless otherwise stated
methods that return a ‘const char *’ will return ‘NULL’ on error.  In
general, the character string returned is only valid until the next
method which returns a ‘const char *’ is called.

For the details of the various classes please see the header files.  In
the future I will generate class references using some automated tool.

6.1.3 Examples
--------------

Two simple examples are included in the examples directory.  The
‘example-c’ program demonstrates most of the Aspell library
functionality and the ‘list-dicts’ lists the available dictionaries.

6.1.4 Notes About Thread Safety
-------------------------------

Aspell should be thread safe, when used properly, as long as the
underlying compiler, C and C++ library is thread safe.  Aspell objects,
including the AspellSpeller class, should not be used by multiple
threads unless they are protected by locks or it is only accessed by
read-only methods.  A method is read-only only if a ‘const’ object is
passed in.  Many methods that seam to be read-only are not because they
may store state information in the object.


File: aspell.info,  Node: Through A Pipe,  Next: Notes on Storing Replacement Pairs,  Prev: Through the C API,  Up: Writing programs to use Aspell

6.2 Through A Pipe
==================

When given the ‘pipe’ or ‘-a’ command, Aspell goes into a pipe mode that
is compatible with ‘ispell -a’.  Aspell also defines its own set of
extensions to Ispell pipe mode.

6.2.1 Format of the Data Stream
-------------------------------

In this mode, Aspell prints a one-line version identification message,
and then begins reading lines of input.  For each input line, a single
line is written to the standard output for each word checked for
spelling on the line.  If the word was found in the main dictionary, or
your personal dictionary, then the line contains only a ‘*’.

If the word is not in the dictionary, but there are suggestions, then
the line contains an ‘&’, a space, the misspelled word, a space, the
number of near misses, the number of characters between the beginning of
the line and the beginning of the misspelled word, a colon, another
space, and a list of the suggestions separated by commas and spaces.

If you set the option ‘run-together’ or ‘camel-case’ and Aspell thinks
this word is a combination of two words in the dictionary, then it
prints a single ‘-’ in one line.

Finally, if the word does not appear in the dictionary, and there are no
suggestions, then the line contains a ‘#’, a space, the misspelled word,
a space, and the character offset from the beginning of the line.  Each
sentence of text input is terminated with an additional blank line,
indicating that Aspell has completed processing the input line.

These output lines can be summarized as follows:

     *OK*: *
     *Suggestions*: & original count offset: miss, miss, …
     *None*: # original offset

When in the ‘-a’ mode, Aspell will also accept lines of single words
prefixed with any of ‘*’, ‘&’, ‘@’, ‘+’, ‘-’, ‘~’, ‘#’, ‘!’, ‘%’, or
‘^’.  A line starting with ‘*’ tells Aspell to insert the word into the
user’s dictionary.  A line starting with ‘&’ tells Aspell to insert an
all-lowercase version of the word into the user’s dictionary.  A line
starting with ‘@’ causes Aspell to accept this word in the future.  A
line starting with ‘+’, followed immediately by a valid mode will cause
Aspell to parse future input according the syntax of that formatter.  A
line consisting solely of a ‘+’ will place Aspell in TeX/LaTeX mode
(similar to the ‘-t’ option) and ‘-’ returns Aspell to its default mode
(which is Nroff unless otherwise specified).  (but these commands are
obsolete).  A line ‘~’, is ignored for Ispell compatibility.  A line
prefixed with ‘#’ will cause the personal dictionaries to be saved.  A
line prefixed with ‘!’ will turn on terse mode (see below), and a line
prefixed with ‘%’ will return Aspell to normal (non-terse) mode.  Any
input following the prefix characters ‘+’, ‘-’, ‘#’, ‘!’, ‘~’, or ‘%’ is
ignored, as is any input following.  To allow spell-checking of lines
beginning with these characters, a line starting with ‘^’ has that
character removed before it is passed to the spell-checking code.  It is
recommended that programmatic interfaces prefix every data line with an
uparrow to protect themselves against future changes in Aspell.

To summarize these:

‘*WORD’ Add a word to the personal dictionary
‘&WORD’ Insert the all-lowercase version of the word in the personal
        dictionary
‘@WORD’ Accept the word, but leave it out of the dictionary
‘#’     Save the current personal dictionary
‘~’     Ignored for Ispell compatibility.
‘+’     Enter TeX mode.
‘+MODE’ Enter the mode specified by MODE.
‘-’     Enter the default mode.
‘!’     Enter terse mode
‘%’     Exit terse mode
‘^’     Spell-check the rest of the line

In terse mode, Aspell will not print lines beginning with ‘*’, which
indicate correct words.  This significantly improves running speed when
the driving program is going to ignore correct words anyway.

In addition to the above commands which are designed for Ispell
compatibility Aspell also supports its own extensions.  All Aspell
extensions follow the following format.

     $$COMMAND [DATA]

Where DATA may or may not be required depending on the particular
command.  Aspell currently supports the following commands:

‘cs OPTION,VALUE’        Change a configuration option.
‘cr OPTION’              Prints the value of a configuration option.
‘pp’                     Returns a list of all words in the current
                         personal wordlist.
‘ps’                     Returns a list of all words in the current
                         session dictionary.
‘l’                      Returns the current language name.
‘ra MIS,COR’             Add the word pair to the replacement
                         dictionary for later use.  Returns nothing.

Anything returned is returned on its own line.  All lists returned have
the following format

     num of items: item1, item2, etc

_(Part of the preceding section was directly copied out of the Ispell
manual)_


File: aspell.info,  Node: Notes on Storing Replacement Pairs,  Prev: Through A Pipe,  Up: Writing programs to use Aspell

6.3 Notes on Storing Replacement Pairs
======================================

The ‘store_repl’ method and the ‘$$ra’ should be used because Aspell is
able to learn from users misspellings.  For example on the first pass a
user misspells _beginning_ as _beging_ so Aspell suggests:

     begging, begin, being, Beijing, bagging, ….

However the user then tries _begning_ and Aspell suggests

     beginning, beaning, begging, …

so the user selects _beginning_.  However, later on in the document the
user misspells it as _begng_ (*not* _beging_).  Normally Aspell will
suggest.

     began, begging, begin, begun, …

However because it knows the user misspelled _beginning_ as _beging_ it
will instead suggest:

     beginning, began, begging, begin, begun …

I myself often misspelled beginning (and still do) as something close to
begging and too many times wind up writing sentences such as "begging
with …".

Please also note that replacements commands have a memory.  Which means
if you first store the replacement pair:

     sicolagest -> psycolagest

then store the replacement pair

     psycolagest -> psychologist

The replacement pair

     sicolagest -> psychologist

will also get stored so that you don’t have to worry about it.


File: aspell.info,  Node: Adding Support For Other Languages,  Next: Implementation Notes,  Prev: Writing programs to use Aspell,  Up: Top

7 Adding Support For Other Languages
************************************

Before you consider adding support for Aspell, first make sure that
someone else has not already done it.  A good number of dictionaries off
the Aspell home page at <http://aspell.net>.  If your language is not
listed above feel free to send mail to aspell-dict at gnu org for help
in getting started.

Adding a language to Aspell is fairly straightforward.  You basically
need to create the language data file, and compile a new word list.

* Menu:

* The Language Data File::      
* Compiling the Word List::     
* Phonetic Code::               
* The Simple Soundslike::       
* Replacement Tables::          
* Affix Compression::           
* Controlling the Behavior of Compound Words::  
* Creating A New Character Set::  
* Creating An Official Dictionary Package::  


File: aspell.info,  Node: The Language Data File,  Next: Compiling the Word List,  Up: Adding Support For Other Languages

7.1 The Language Data File
==========================

The basic format of the language data file is the same as it is for the
Aspell configuration file.  It is named ‘LANG.dat’ and is located in the
architecture independent data dir for Aspell (option ‘data-dir’) which
is usually ‘PREFIX/share/aspell’.  Use ‘aspell config’ to find out where
it is in your installation.  By convention the language name should be
the two letter ISO 639 language code if it exists, if not use the three
letter code.

The language data file has several mandatory fields, and several
optional ones.  All fields are case sensitive and should be in all lower
case.

The two mandatory fields are ‘name’ and ‘charset’.

‘name’ is the name of the language and should be the same as the file
name (without the ‘.dat’).

‘charset’ is the 8-bit character set Aspell will expect the word lists
to be formatted in.  If possible choose from one of the standard ones
provided with Aspell.  These are ‘iso-8859-*’, ‘koi8-*’, or ‘viscii’.
If your language does not require any non-ascii characters choose
‘iso-8859-1’.  If one of these standard character sets is not suitable
for your language then you can create a new one.  *Note Creating A New
Character Set::.

The optional fields are as follows:

‘data-encoding’

     The encoding the language data files are expected to be in as well
     as the default encoding to use when saving the personal
     dictionaries.  It can be either ‘utf-8’ or any of the 8-bit
     encoding that Aspell supports.  If not set, then it defaults to
     ‘charset’.

‘special’

     Non-letter characters that can appear in your language such as the
     ‘'’ and ‘-’.  The format for the value is a list separated by
     spaces.  Each item of the list has the following format.

          <char> <begin><middle><end>

     CHAR is the non-letter character in question.  BEGIN, MIDDLE, END
     are either a ‘-’ or a ‘*’.  A star for BEGIN means that the
     character can begin a word, a ‘-’ means it can’t.  The same is true
     for MIDDLE and END.  For example, the entry for the ‘'’ in English
     is:

          ' -*-

     To include more than one middle character just list them one after
     another on the same line.  For example, to make both the ‘'’ and
     the ‘-’ a middle character, use the following line in the language
     data file:

          special ' -*- - -*-

     However, please be aware that adding special characters can have
     unintended consequences due to limitations of Aspell.  For example
     if the ‘-’ was accepted as a middle character, then _every_ word
     with a ‘-’ in it would be flagged as a spelling error unless that
     exact word is in the dictionary, even if both parts are in the
     dictionary.  Also, having a ‘.’ as an end character will cause the
     ‘.’ to be part of any misspelled words.  Which can get very
     annoying if you misspell a word at the end of a sentence.

‘soundslike’

     The name of the soundslike data for the language.  The data is
     expected to be in the file ‘NAME_phonet.dat’.

     If NAME is ‘simpile’ then a very simple soundslike is used.  This
     is not as powerful as full phonetic soundslike but it can be
     computed a lot faster.  (*note The Simple Soundslike::)

     If the soundslike name is ‘none’, or this option is not specified,
     then no soundslike will be used.  The effective soundslike is the
     word converted to all lowercase and possibly with accents stripped
     depending on the ‘store-as’ option.  For languages with phonetic
     spelling the difference will not be very noticeable.  However, for
     languages with non-phonetic spelling there will be a noticeable
     difference.  The difference you notice will depend on the quality
     of the soundslike data file.  If you do not notice much of a
     difference for a language with non-phonetic spelling that is a good
     indication that the soundslike data is not rough enough—or the
     words you are trying are not that badly misspelled.

‘invisible-soundslike’

     Avoid storing the soundslike information with the word.  Instead it
     is computed as needed.  This option defaults to true if the
     soundslike is ‘none’ or ‘simpile’, and false when a phonetic
     soundslike is used.

‘repl-table’

     *Note Replacement Tables::.

‘keyboard’

     The base name of the keyboard definition file to use.  For more
     information see *note Notes on Typo-Analysis::.

‘sug-split-char’

     A list of characters which specifies which characters to insert
     between two words when a word is split.  This is a list option.

‘affix’
‘affix-compress’
‘partially-expand’

     *Note Affix Compression::.

‘store-as’

     How the words are indexed in the dictionary.  If "stripped" then
     the word is indexed in a lower case and de-accented form.  If
     "lower", then the word is indexed in a lower case form but with
     accent info still intact.  This just controls how the word is
     indexed, not how it is stored.  The default is "stripped" unless
     affix compression is used.

‘norm-required’

     Should be set to true if your language makes use of private use
     characters or when Normalization Form C is not the same as full
     composition.

‘normalize’

‘norm-form’

Additional options includes options to control how run-together words
are handled the same way as they are in the normal configuration files.
for more information, please *note Controlling the Behavior of Compound
Words::.


File: aspell.info,  Node: Compiling the Word List,  Next: Phonetic Code,  Prev: The Language Data File,  Up: Adding Support For Other Languages

7.2 Compiling the Word List
===========================

Once you have a working language data file installed in the right place
you are ready to compile the main word list.  To find out what to do,
see *note Working With Dictionaries::.  This section also includes
instructions for creating the AWLI file.


File: aspell.info,  Node: Phonetic Code,  Next: The Simple Soundslike,  Prev: Compiling the Word List,  Up: Adding Support For Other Languages

7.3 Phonetic Code
=================

Aspell is in fact the spell checker that comes up with the best
suggestions if it finds an unknown word.  One reason is that it does not
just compare the word with other words in the dictionary (like Ispell
does) but also uses phonetic comparisons with other words.

The new table driven phonetic code is very flexible and setting up
phonetic transformation rules for other languages is not difficult but
there can be a number of stumbling blocks — that’s why I wrote this
section.

The main phonetic code is free of any language specific code and should
be powerful enough to allow setting up rules for any language.  Anything
which is language specific is kept in a plain text file and can easily
be edited.  So it’s even possible to write phonetic transformation rules
if you don’t have any programming skills.  All you need to know is how
words of the language are written and how they are pronounced.

7.3.1 Syntax of the transformation array
----------------------------------------

In the translation array there are two strings on each line; the first
one is the search string (or switch name) and the second one is the
replacement string (or switch parameter).  The line

     version   VERSION

is also required to appear somewhere in the translation array.  The
version string can be anything but it should be changed whenever a new
version of the translation array is released.  This is important because
it will keep Aspell from using a compiled dictionary with the wrong set
of rules.  For example, if when coming up with suggestion for ‘hallo’,
Aspell will use the new rules to come up with the soundslike say ‘H*L*’,
but if ‘hello’ is stored in the dictionary using the old rules as ‘HL’
instead of ‘H*L*’ Aspell will never be able to come up with ‘hello’.  So
to solve this problem Aspell checks if the version strings match and
aborts with an error if they don’t.  Thus it is important to update it
whenever a new version of the translation array is released.  This is
only a problem with the main word list as the personal word lists are
now stored as simple word lists with a single header line (i.e.  no
soundslike data).

Each non switch line represents one replacement (transformation) rule.
Words beginning with the same letter must be grouped together; the order
inside this group does not depend on alphabetical issues but it gives
priorities; the higher the rule the higher the priority.  That’s why the
first rule that matches is applied.  In the following example:

     GH   _
     G    K

‘GH -> _’ has higher priority than ‘G -> K’

‘_’ represents the empty string “”.  If ‘GH -> _’ came after ‘G -> K’,
the second rule would never match because the algorithm would stop
searching for more rules after the first match.  The above rules
transform any ‘GH’ to an empty string (delete them) and transforms any
other ‘G’ to ‘K’.

At the end of the first string of a line (the search string) there may
optionally stand a number of characters in brackets.  One (only one!)
of these characters must fit.  It’s comparable with the ‘[ ]’ brackets
in regular expressions.  The rule ‘DG(EIY) -> J’ for example would match
any ‘DGE’, ‘DGI’ and ‘DGY’ and replace them with ‘J’.  This way you can
reduce several rules to one.

Before the search string, one or more dashes ‘-’ may be placed.  Those
search strings will be matched totally but only the beginning of the
string will be replaced.  Furthermore, for these rules no follow-up rule
will be searched (what this is will be explained later).  The rule
‘TCH-- ’-> _ will match any word containing ‘TCH’ (like ‘match’) but
will only replace the first character ‘T’ with an empty string.  The
number of dashes determines how many characters from the end will not be
replaced.  After the replacement, the search for transformation rules
continues with the not replaced ‘CH’!

If a ‘<’ is appended to the search string, the search for replacement
rules will continue with the replacement string and not with the next
character of the word.  The rule ‘PH< -> F’ for example would replace
‘PH’ with ‘F’ and then again start to search for a replacement rule for
‘F…’.  If there would also be rules like ‘FO ’-> ‘O’ and ‘F -> _’ then
words like ‘PHOXYZ’ would be transformed to ‘OXYZ’ and any occurrences
of ‘PH’ that are not followed by an ‘O’ will be deleted like ‘PHIXYZ ->
IXYZ’.  The second replacement however is not applied if the priority of
this rule is lower than the priority of the first rule.

Priorities are added to a rule by putting a number between 0 and 9 at
the end of the search string, for example ‘ING6 -> N’.  The higher the
number the higher is the priority.

Priorities are especially important for the previously mentioned
follow-up rules.  Follow-up rules are searched beginning from the last
string of the first search string.  This is a bit complicated but I hope
this example will make it clearer:

     CHS      X
     CH       G

     HAU--1   H

     SCH      SH

In this example ‘CHS’ in the word ‘FUCHS’ would be transformed to ‘X’.
If we take the word ‘DURCHSCHNITT’ then things look a bit different.
Here ‘CH’ belongs together and ‘SCH’ belongs together and both are
spoken separately.  The algorithm however first finds the string ‘CHS’
which may not be transformed like in the previous word ‘FUCHS’.  At this
point the algorithm can find a follow-up rule.  It takes the last
character of the first matching rule (‘CHS’) which is ‘S’ and looks for
the next match, beginning from this character.  What it finds is clear:
It finds ‘SCH -> SH’, which has the same priority (no priority means
standard priority, which is 5).  If the priority is the same or higher
the follow-up rule will be applied.  Let’s take a look at the word
‘SCHAUKEL’.  In this word ‘SCH’ belongs together and may not be taken
apart.  After the algorithm has found ‘SCH ’-> ‘SH’ it searches for a
follow-up rule for ‘H+’‘AUKEL’.  It finds ‘HAU--1 -> H’, but does not
apply it because its priority is lower than the one of the first rule.
You see that this is a very powerful feature but it also can easily lead
to mistakes.  If you really don’t need this feature you can turn it off
by putting the line:

     followup      0

at the beginning of the phonetic table file.  As mentioned, for rules
containing a ‘-’ no follow-up rules are searched but giving such rules a
priority is not totally senseless because they can be follow-up rules
and in that case the priority makes sense again.  Follow-up rules of
follow-up rules are not searched because this is in fact not needed very
often.

The control character ‘^’ says that the search string only matches at
the beginning of words so that the rule ‘RH -> R’ will only apply to
words like ‘RHESUS’ but not ‘PERHAPS’.  You can append another ‘^’ to
the search string.  In that case the algorithm treats the rest of the
word totally separately from the first matched string at the beginning.
This is useful for prefixes whose pronunciation does not depend on the
rest of the word and vice versa like ‘OVER^^’ in English for example.

The same way as ‘^’ works does ‘$’ only apply to words that end with the
search string.  ‘GN$ -> N’ only matches on words like ‘SIGN’ but not
‘SIGNUM’.  If you use ‘^’ and ‘$’ together, both of them must fit
‘ENOUGH^$ -> NF’ will only match the word ‘ENOUGH’ and nothing else.

Of course you can combine all of the mentioned control characters but
they must occur in this order: ‘< - priority ^ $’.  All characters must
be written in CAPITAL letters.

If absolutely no rule can be found — might happen if you use strange
characters for which you don’t have any replacement rule — the next
character will simply be skipped and the search for replacement rules
will continue with the rest of the word.

If you want double letters to be reduced to one you must set up a rule
like ‘LL- -> L’.  If double letters in the resulting phonetic word
should be allowed, you must place the line:

     collapse_result     0

at the beginning of your transformation table file; otherwise set the
value to ‘1’.  The English rules for example strip all vowels from words
and so the word "GOGO" would be transformed to "K" and not to "KK" (as
desired) if ‘collapse_result’ is set to 1.  That’s why the English rules
have ‘collapse_result’ set to ‘0’.

By default, all accents are removed from a word before it is matched to
the soundslike rules.  If you do not want this then add the line

     remove_accents      0

at the beginning of your file.  The exact definition of an accent is
language dependent and is controlled via the character set file.  If you
set remove_accents to ’0’ then you should also set "store-as" to "lower"
in the language data file (not the phonetic transformation file)
otherwise Aspell will have problems when both the accented and the
de-accented version of a word appearing in the dictionary; it will
consider one of them as incorrectly spelled.

7.3.2 How do I start finally?
-----------------------------

Before you start to write an array of transformation rules, you should
be aware that you have to do some work to make sure that things you do
will result in correct transformation rules.

7.3.2.1 Things that come in handy
.................................

First of all, you need to have a large word list of the language you
want to make phonetics for.  It should contain about as many words as
the dictionary of the spell checker.  If you don’t have such a list, you
will probably find an Ispell dictionary at
<http://fmg-www.cs.ucla.edu/geoff/ispell-dictionaries.html> which will
help you.  You can then make affix expansion via ‘ispell -e’ and then
pipe it through ‘tr " " "\n"’ to put one word on each line.  After that
you eventually have to convert special characters like ‘é’ from Ispell’s
internal representation to latin1 encoding.  ‘sed s/e'/é/g’ for example
would replace all ‘e'’ with ‘é’.

The second is that you know how to use regular expressions and know how
to use ‘grep’.  You should for example know that:

     grep ^[^aeiou]qu[io] wordlist | less

will show you all words that begin with any character but ‘a’, ‘e’, ‘i’,
‘o’ or ‘u’ and then continue with ‘qui’ or ‘quo’.  This stuff is
important for example to find out if a phonetic replacement rule you
want to set up is valid for all words which match the expression you
want to replace.  Taking a look at the regex(7) man page is a good idea.

7.3.2.2 What the phonetic code should do
........................................

Normal text comparison works well as long as the typer misspells a word
because he pressed one key he didn’t really want to press.  In these
cases, mostly one character differs from the original word.

In cases where the writer didn’t know about the correct spelling of the
word, the word may have several characters that differ from the original
word but usually the word would still sound like the original.  Someone
might think that ‘tough’ is spelled ‘taff’.  No spell checker without
phonetic code will come to the idea that this might be ‘tough’, but a
spell checker who knows that ‘taff’ would be pronounced like ‘tough’
will make good suggestions to the user.  Another example could be
‘funetik’ and ‘phonetic’.

From these examples you can see that the phonetic transformation should
not be too fussy and too precise.  If you implement a whole phonetic
dictionary as you can find it in books this will not be very useful
because then there could still be many characters differing from the
misspelled and the desired word.  What you should do if you implement
the phonetic transformation table is to reduce the number of used
letters to the only really necessary ones.

Characters that sound similar should be reduced to one.  In the English
language for example ‘Z’ sounds like ‘S’ and that’s why the
transformation rule ‘Z -> S’ is present in the replacement table.  “PH
is spoken like “F and so we have a ‘PH -> F’ rule.

If you take a closer look you will even see that vowels sound very
similar in the English language: ‘contradiction’, ‘cuntradiction’,
‘cantradiction’ or ‘centradiction’ in fact sound nearly the same, don’t
they?  Therefore the English phonetic replacement rules not only reduce
all vowels to one but even remove them all (removing is done by just
setting up no rule for those letters).  The phonetic code of
“contradiction” is “KNTRTKXN” and if you try to read this letter-monster
loud you will hear that it still sound a bit like ‘contradiction’.  You
also see that “D” is transformed to “T” because they nearly sound the
same.

If you think you have found a regularity you should _always_ take your
word list and ‘grep’ for the corresponding regular expression you want
to make a transformation rule for.  An example: If you come to the idea
that all English words ending on ‘ough’ sound like ‘AF’ at the end
because you think of ‘enough’ and ‘tough’.  If you then ‘grep’ for the
corresponding regular expression by ‘grep -i ough$ wordlist’ you will
see that the rule you wanted to set up is not correct because the rule
doesn’t fit to words like ‘although’ or ‘bough’.  So you have to define
your rule more precisely or you have to set up exceptions if the number
of words that differ from the desired rule is not too big.

Don’t forget about follow-up rules which can help in many cases but
which also can lead to confusion and unwanted side effects.  It’s also
important to write exceptions in front of the more general rules (‘GH’
before ‘G’ etc.).

If you think you have set up a number of rules that may produce some
good results try them out!  If you run Aspell as ‘aspell
--lang=YOUR_LANGUAGE pipe’ you get a prompt at which you can type in
words.  If you just type words Aspell checks them and eventually makes
suggestions if they are misspelled.  If you type in ‘$$Sw WORD’ you will
see the phonetic transformation and you can test out if your work does
what you want.

Another good way to check that changes you make to your rules don’t have
any bad side effects is to create another list from your word list which
contains not only the word of the word list but also the corresponding
phonetic version of this word on the same line.  If you do this once
before the change and once after the change you can make a diff (see
‘man diff’) to see what _really_ changed.  To do this use the command
‘aspell --lang=YOUR_LANGUAGE soundslike’.  In this mode Aspell will
output the the original word and then its soundslike separated by a tab
character for each word you give it.  If you are interested in seeing
how the algorithm works you can download a set of useful programs from
<http://members.xoom.com/maccy/spell/phonet-utils.tar.gz>.  This
includes a program that produces a list as mentioned above and another
program which illustrates how the algorithm works.  It uses the same
transformation table as Aspell and so it helps a lot during the process
of creating a phonetic transformation table for Aspell.

During your work you should write down your basic ideas so that other
people are able to understand what you did (and you still know about it
after a few weeks).  The English table has a huge documentation appended
as an example.

Now you can start experimenting with all the things you just read and
perhaps set up a nice phonetic transformation table for your language to
help Aspell to come up with the best correction suggestions ever seen
also for your language.  Take a look at the Aspell homepage to see if
there is already a transformation table for your language.  If there is
one you might also take a look at it to see if it could be improved.

If you think that this section helped you or if you think that this is
just a waste of time you can send any feedback to <bjoern.jacke@gmx.de>.


File: aspell.info,  Node: The Simple Soundslike,  Next: Replacement Tables,  Prev: Phonetic Code,  Up: Adding Support For Other Languages

7.4 The Simple Soundslike
=========================

The simple soundslike goes something like this:

     sl0[0] = lookup0(word[0])
     for (i = 1; i < size; i++)
       sl0[i] = lookup(word[i]);
     s = 0;
     for (i = 0; i < size; i++)
       sl.append(al0[i]) unless sl0[i] == 0 || sl0[i] == sl0[i-1];

Basically each character can be converted to another character or
deleted.  A separate lookup table is used for the first character.  If
the same soundslike letter is repeated, the duplicate is removed.

By default all accents are removed, and all vowels are deleted unless
they appear at the start of the word in which case they are converted to
a ‘*’.  The exact behavior can be customized via the character data
file.

The simplified soundslike has the advantage that it is very fast to
compute and thus does not need to be stored with a word.  Also, when
affix compression is used and the ‘partially-expand’ is given the
results will be identical to the results when affix compression is not
used.

Of course it is not nearly as powerful as the phonetic soundslike.


File: aspell.info,  Node: Replacement Tables,  Next: Affix Compression,  Prev: The Simple Soundslike,  Up: Adding Support For Other Languages

7.5 Replacement Tables
======================

When phonetic code is not used a replacement table can be used instead.
To enable the use of a replacement table add the line ‘repl-table LANG’,
in which case the replacement table is excepted to be in the file
‘LANG_repl.dat’.  A complete file name can also be specified in place of
LANG.  For compatibility with MySpell the replacement table can also be
part of the affix file, in which case ‘repl-table’ will be
‘LANG_affix.dat"’.

Replacement table syntax:

     REP [number_of_replacement_definitions]
     REP [what] [replacement]
     REP [what] [replacement]

For example a possible English replacement table definition to handle
misspelled consonants:

     REP 8
     REP f ph
     REP ph f
     REP f gh
     REP gh f
     REP j dg
     REP dg j
     REP k ch
     REP ch k


File: aspell.info,  Node: Affix Compression,  Next: Controlling the Behavior of Compound Words,  Prev: Replacement Tables,  Up: Adding Support For Other Languages

7.6 Affix Compression
=====================

Aspell, as of version 0.60, now has support for affix compression.  The
codebase comes from MySpell found in OpenOffice.

To add support for affix compression add the following lines to the
language data file.

     affix          LANG
     affix-compress true

The line ‘affix LANG’ adds support for recognizing affix information,
and the line ‘affix-compress true’ enables affix compression.

The affix file is expected to be named ‘LANG_affix.dat’.  It is the
exact same format as those used by MySpell.  More information can be
found in the myspell/ directory of the distribution or at
<http://lingucomponent.openoffice.org/dictionary.html>.

Affix compression can also be used with soundslike lookup.  Aspell does
this by only storing the soundslike for the root word.  When a word is
misspelled it will search for a soundslike close to all possible roots
of the misspelled word.

When no soundslike information, or the simple soundslike, is used it may
be beneficial to specify the option ‘partially-expand’ which will
partially expand a word with affix information so that the affix flags
do not affect the first 3 letters of the word.  This will allow Aspell
to get more accurate results when scanning the list for near misses
since the full word can be used and not just the root.  Specifying this
option, however, will also effectively expand any prefixes.  Thus this
option should not be used for prefix heavy languages such as Hebrew.

An existing word list, without affix info, can be affix compressed using
using ‘aspell munch-list’.

7.6.1 Format of the Affix File
------------------------------

An affix is either a prefix or a suffix attached to root words to make
other words.  For example supply -> supplied by dropping the "y" and
adding an "ied" (the suffix).

Here is an example of how to define one specific suffix borrowed from
the English affix file.

     SFX D Y 4
     SFX D   0     d          e
     SFX D   y     ied        [^aeiou]y
     SFX D   0     ed         [^ey]
     SFX D   0     ed         [aeiou]y

This file is space delimited and case sensitive.  So this information
can be interpreted as follows:

The first line has 4 fields:

1    SFX         indicates this is a suffix
2    D           is the name of the character which represents this
                 suffix
3    Y           indicates it can be combined with prefixes (cross
                 product)
4    4           indicates that sequence of 4 affix entries are needed to
                 properly store the affix information

The remaining lines describe the unique information for the 4 affix
entries that make up this affix.  Each line can be interpreted as
follows: (note fields 1 and 2 are used as a check against line 1 info)

1    SFX         indicates this is a suffix
2    D           is the name of the character which represents this affix
3    y           the string of chars to strip off before adding affix (a
                 0 here indicates the NULL string)
4    ied         the string of affix characters to add (a 0 here
                 indicates the NULL string)
5    [^aeiou]y   the conditions which must be met before the affix can be
                 applied

Field 5 is interesting.  Since this is a suffix, field 5 tells us that
there are 2 conditions that must be met.  The first condition is that
the next to the last character in the word must _not_ be any of the
following "a", "e", "i", "o" or "u".  The second condition is that the
last character of the word must end in "y".

7.6.2 When Compared With Ispell
-------------------------------

Now for comparison purposes, here is the same information from the
Ispell ‘english.aff’ compression file which was used as the basis for
the OOo one.

     flag *D:
         E           >       D               # As in create > created
         [^AEIOU]Y   >       -Y,IED          # As in imply > implied
         [^EY]       >       ED              # As in cross > crossed
         [AEIOU]Y    >       ED              # As in convey > conveyed

The Ispell information has exactly the same information but in a
slightly different (case-insensitive) format:

Here are the ways to see the mapping from Ispell .aff format to our OOo
format.

  1. The Ispell english.aff has flag D under the "suffix" section so you
     know it is a suffix.

  2. The D is the character assigned to this suffix

  3. ‘*’ indicates that it can be combined with prefixes

  4. Each line following the : describes the affix entries needed to
     define this suffix

        • The first field is the conditions that must be met.
        • The second field is after the > if a "-" occurs is the string
          to strip off (can be blank).
        • The third field is the string to add (the affix)

In addition all chars in Ispell aff files are in uppercase.

7.6.3 Specifying Affix Flags
----------------------------

Affix flags are specified in the word list by specifying them after the
‘/’ character:

     WORD/FLAGS

For example:

     create/DG

will associate the ‘D’ and ‘G’ flag with the word create.


File: aspell.info,  Node: Controlling the Behavior of Compound Words,  Next: Creating A New Character Set,  Prev: Affix Compression,  Up: Adding Support For Other Languages

7.7 Controlling the Behavior of Compound Words
==============================================

Aspell has support for unconditionally accepting run-together words or
accepting camelCase words.

Support for unconditionally accepting run-together words can either be
turned on in the language data file or as a normal option via the
‘run-together’ option.  The ‘run-together-limit’ options controls the
maximum number of words that can be strung together, the default is
normally 2.  The ‘run-together-min’ options controls the minimum length
of the individual components of the run together word, the default is
normally 3.  Both the ‘run-together-limit’ and ‘run-together-min’ option
may be specified in both the language data file or as a normal option.

Support for accepting camelCase words can be enabled via the
‘camel-case’ option.  When this option is enabled Aspell will accept
‘camelCase’ but will reject ‘camelcase’.  In addition, Aspell will
attempt to provide reasonable suggestions when a camelCase word is
misspelled.  It will correct typos such as ‘camelcase’ or ‘camelcAse’
and suggest ‘camelCase’.  If a single part of a camelCase word is
misspelled it will attempt to correct that part.  When camelCase mode is
enabled Aspell will not attempt to split a word by default, to change
this simply set ‘sug-split-char’.


File: aspell.info,  Node: Creating A New Character Set,  Next: Creating An Official Dictionary Package,  Prev: Controlling the Behavior of Compound Words,  Up: Adding Support For Other Languages

7.8 Creating A New Character Set
================================

If there is not a standard character set for your language then you can
invent one.  The new charset will only be used by Aspell internally.  If
the option ‘data-encoding’ is set to ‘utf-8’, and your current locale
character type is always set to ‘utf-8’, then you can use UTF-8 for
everything and not worry yourself that an 8-bit character set is being
used internally.  If your language has no more than 210 distinct
symbols, including different capitalizations and accents, then Aspell
can support it.

The first thing to do is to download the Aspell lang package (*note
Creating An Official Dictionary Package::) and check if one of the
provided charsets in this package will suite your needs.  Non-standard
character sets are provided for many scripts and languages.  If not,
then see the included ‘README’ file for instructions on creating a new
one.  Version 0.1, and 0.2 of mkchardata _will not_ work as the format
of the character data file has changed.


File: aspell.info,  Node: Creating An Official Dictionary Package,  Prev: Creating A New Character Set,  Up: Adding Support For Other Languages

7.9 Creating An Official Dictionary Package
===========================================

Once you have a basic dictionary working, you should consider creating
an official package so that it can be distributed with Aspell.  To do so
download the aspell-lang package available at
<ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/aspell/aspell-lang-VERSION.tar.bz2> or in the
“aspell-lang” module in the Aspell CVS repository available at
<https://savannah.gnu.org/cvs/?group=aspell>.  See the included ‘README’
file for what to do.  Or, send mail to aspell-dict at gnu org asking for
help on how to get started.


File: aspell.info,  Node: Implementation Notes,  Next: Installing,  Prev: Adding Support For Other Languages,  Up: Top

Appendix A Implementation Notes
*******************************

* Menu:

* Aspell Suggestion Strategy::  
* Notes on 8-bit Characters::   


File: aspell.info,  Node: Aspell Suggestion Strategy,  Next: Notes on 8-bit Characters,  Up: Implementation Notes

A.1 Aspell Suggestion Strategy
==============================

The magic behind my spell checker comes from merging Lawrence Philips
excellent metaphone algorithm and Ispell’s near miss strategy which is
inserting a space or hyphen, interchanging two adjacent letters,
changing one letter, deleting a letter, or adding a letter.

The process goes something like this.

  1. Convert the misspelled word to its soundslike equivalent (its
     metaphone for English words).

  2. Find all words that have a soundslike within one or two edit
     distances from the original word’s soundslike.  The edit distance
     is the total number of deletions, insertions, exchanges, or
     adjacent swaps needed to make one string equivalent to the other.
     When set to only look for soundslikes within one edit distance it
     tries all possible soundslike combinations and checks if each one
     is in the dictionary.  When set to find all soundslike within two
     edit distances it scans through the entire dictionary and quickly
     scores each soundslike.  The scoring is quick because it will give
     up if the two soundslikes are more than two edit distances apart.

  3. Find misspelled words that have a correctly spelled replacement by
     the same criteria of step number 2 and 3.  That is the misspelled
     word in the word pair (such as “teh -> the”) would appear in the
     suggestions list as if it was a correct spelling.

  4. Score the result list and return the words with the lowest score.
     The score is roughly the weighed average of the weighed edit
     distance of the word to the misspelled word and the soundslike
     equivalent of the two words.  The weighted edit distance is like
     the edit distance except that the various edits have weights
     attached to them.

  5. Replace the misspelled words that have correctly spelled
     replacements with their replacements and remove any duplicates that
     might arise because of this.

Please note that the soundslike equivalent is a rough approximation of
how the words sounds.  It is not the phoneme of the word by any means.
For more details about exactly how each step is performed please see the
file ‘suggest.cc’.  For more information on the metaphone algorithm
please see the data file ‘english_phonet.dat’.


File: aspell.info,  Node: Notes on 8-bit Characters,  Prev: Aspell Suggestion Strategy,  Up: Implementation Notes

A.2 Notes on 8-bit Characters
=============================

There is a very good reason I use 8-bit characters in Aspell.  Speed and
simplicity.  While many parts of my code can fairly easily be converted
to some sort of wide character as my code is clean.  Other parts cannot
be.

One of the reasons why is because in many, many places I use a direct
lookup to find out various information about characters.  With 8-bit
characters this is very feasible because there is only 256 of them.
With 16-bit wide characters this will waste a LOT of space.  With 32-bit
characters this is just plain impossible.  Converting the lookup tables
to another form is certainly possible but degrades performance
significantly.

Furthermore, some of my algorithms rely on words consisting only on a
small number of distinct characters (often around 30 when case and
accents are not considered).  When the possible character can consist of
any Unicode character this number becomes several thousand, if that.  In
order for these algorithms to still be used, some sort of limit will
need to be placed on the possible characters the word can contain.  If I
impose that limit, I might as well use some sort of 8-bit characters set
which will automatically place the limit on what the characters can be.

There is also the issue of how I should store the word lists in memory?
As a string of 32 bit wide characters.  Now that is using up 4 times
more memory than characters would and for languages that can fit within
an 8-bit character that is, in my view, a gross waste of memory.  So
maybe I should store them is some variable width format such as UTF-8.
Unfortunately, way, way too many of the algorithms will simply not work
with variable width characters without significant modification which
will very likely degrade performance.  So the solution is to work with
the characters as 32-bit wide characters and then convert it to a
shorter representation when storing them in the lookup tables.  Now that
can lead to an inefficiency.  I could also use 16 bit wide characters,
however that may not be good enough to hold all future versions of
Unicode and therefore has the same problems.

As a response to the space waste used by storing word lists in some sort
of wide format some one asked:

     Since hard drives are cheaper and cheaper, you could store a
     dictionary in a usable (uncompressed) form and use it directly with
     memory mapping.  Then the efficiency would directly depend on the
     disk caching method, and only the used part of the dictionaries
     would really be loaded into memory.  You would no more have to load
     plain dictionaries into main memory, you’ll just want to compute
     some indexes (or something like that) after mapping.

However, the fact of the matter is that most of the dictionary will be
read into memory anyway if it is available.  If it is not available then
there would be a good deal of disk swaps.  Making characters 32-bit wide
will increase the chance that there are more disk swaps.  So the bottom
line is that it is more efficient to convert characters from something
like UTF-8 into some sort of 8-bit character.  I could also use some
sort of disk space lookup table such as the Berkeley Database.  However
this will *definitely* degrade performance.

The bottom line is that keeping Aspell 8-bit internally is a very well
though out decision that is not likely to change any time soon.  Feel
free to challenge me on it, but, don’t expect me to change my mind
unless you can bring up some point that I have not thought of before and
quite possibly a patch to solve cleanly convert Aspell to Unicode
internally without a serious performance lost OR serious memory usage
increase.


File: aspell.info,  Node: Installing,  Next: ChangeLog,  Prev: Implementation Notes,  Up: Top

Appendix B Installing
*********************

Aspell requires gcc 2.95 (or better) as the C++ compiler.  Other C++
compilers should work with some effort.  Other C++ compilers for mostly
POSIX compliant (Unix, Linux, BeOS, Cygwin) systems should work without
any major problems provided that the compile can handle all of the
advanced C++ features Aspell uses.  C++ compilers for non-Unix systems
might work but it will take some work.  Aspell at very least requires a
Unix-like environment (‘sh’, ‘grep’, ‘sed’, ‘tr’, …), and Perl in order
to build.  Aspell also uses a few POSIX functions when necessary.

The latest version can always be found at GNU Aspell’s home page at
<http://aspell.net>.

* Menu:

* Generic Install Instructions::
* HTML Manuals and "make clean"::
* Curses Notes::
* Loadable Filter Notes::
* Using 32-Bit Dictionaries on a 64-Bit System::
* Upgrading from Aspell 0.60.7::
* Upgrading from Aspell 0.50::
* Upgrading from Aspell .33/Pspell .12::
* Upgrading from a Pre-0.50 snapshot::
* WIN32 Notes::


File: aspell.info,  Node: Generic Install Instructions,  Next: HTML Manuals and "make clean",  Up: Installing

B.1 Generic Install Instructions
================================

     ./configure && make

For additional ‘configure’ options type ‘./configure --help’.  You can
control what C++ compiler is used by setting the environment variable
‘CXX’ before running configure and you can control what flags are passed
to the C++ compile via the environment variable ‘CXXFLAGS’.  Static
libraries are disabled by default since static libraries will not work
right due to the mixing of C and C++.  When a C program links with the
static libraries in Aspell it is likely to crash because Aspell’s C++
objects are not getting initialized correctly.  However, if for some
reason you want them, you can enable them via ‘--enable-static’.

Aspell should then compile without any additional user intervention.  If
you run into problems please first check the sections below as that
might solve your problem.

To install the program simply type

     make install

After Aspell is installed at least one dictionary needs to be installed.
You can find them at <http://aspell.net/>.  The ‘aspell’ program must be
in your path in order for the dictionaries to install correctly.

If you do not have Ispell or the traditional Unix ‘spell’ utility
installed on your system then you should also copy the compatibility
scripts ‘ispell’ and ‘spell’ located in the ‘scripts/’ directory into
your binary directory which is usually ‘/usr/local/bin’ so that programs
that expect the ‘ispell’ or ‘spell’ command will work correctly.


File: aspell.info,  Node: HTML Manuals and "make clean",  Next: Curses Notes,  Prev: Generic Install Instructions,  Up: Installing

B.2 HTML Manuals and ‘make clean’
=================================

The Aspell distribution includes HTML versions of the User and
Developer’s manual.  Unfortunately, doing a ‘make clean’ will erase
them.  This is due to a limitation of automake which is not easily
fixed.  If makeinfo is installed they can easily be rebuild with ‘make
aspell.html aspell-dev.html’, or you can unpack them from the tarball.


File: aspell.info,  Node: Curses Notes,  Next: Loadable Filter Notes,  Prev: HTML Manuals and "make clean",  Up: Installing

B.3 Curses Notes
================

If you are having problems compiling ‘check_funs.cpp’ then the most
likely reason is due to incompatibilities with the curses implementation
on your system.  You should first try disabling the “wide” curses
library with the ‘--disable-wide-curses’ configure option.  By doing so
you will lose support for properly displaying UTF-8 characters but you
may still be able to get the full screen interface.  If this fails then
you can disable curses support altogether with the ‘--disable-curses’
configure option.  By doing this you will lose the nice full screen
interface but hopefully you will be able to at least get Aspell to
compile correctly.

If the curses library is installed in a non-standard location then you
can specify the library and include directory with ‘--enable-curses=LIB’
and ‘--enable-curses-include=DIR’.

‘LIB’ can either be the complete path of the library—for example
     /usr/local/curses/libcurses.a
or the name of the library (for example ‘ncurses’) or a combined
location and library in the form ‘-LLIBDIR -lLIB’ (for example
‘-L/usr/local/ncurses/lib -lncurses’).

DIR is the location of the curses header files (for example
‘/usr/local/ncurses/include’).

B.3.1 Unicode Support
---------------------

In order for Aspell to correctly spell check UTF-8 documents in full
screen mode the “wide” version of the curses library must be installed.
This is different from the normal version of curses library, and is
normally named ‘libcursesw’ (with a ‘w’ at the end) or ‘libncursesw’.
UTF-8 documents will not display correctly without the right curses
version installed.

In addition your system must also support the ‘mblen’ function.
Although this function was defined in the ISO C89 standard (ANSI
X3.159-1989), not all systems have it.


File: aspell.info,  Node: Loadable Filter Notes,  Next: Using 32-Bit Dictionaries on a 64-Bit System,  Prev: Curses Notes,  Up: Installing

B.4 Loadable Filter Notes
=========================

Support for being able to load additional filter modules at run-time has
only been verified to work on Linux platforms.  If you get linker errors
when trying to use a filter, then it is likely that loadable filter
support is not working yet on your platform.  Thus, in order to get
Aspell to work correctly you will need to avoid compiling the filters as
individual modules by using the ‘--enable-compile-in-filters’
‘configure’ option.


File: aspell.info,  Node: Using 32-Bit Dictionaries on a 64-Bit System,  Next: Upgrading from Aspell 0.60.7,  Prev: Loadable Filter Notes,  Up: Installing

B.5 Using 32-Bit Dictionaries on a 64-Bit System
================================================

Due to an oversight, Aspell compiled dictionaries not only depend on the
endian order, they also depend on the the size of the ‘size_t’ type,
which is generally different on 32 and 64-bit systems.  The ‘size_t’
type is used in the hash function of the compiled dictionaries.  To
force the hash function to use a 32-bit integer instead, use the
‘--enable-32-bit-hash-fun’ configure option.  This option will allow you
to use dictionaries compiled on a 32-bit machine on a 64-bit one as long
as the endian order is the same.  Of course, dictionaries compiled on a
64-bit machine without this option enabled will no longer be usable.  If
Aspell detects that an incompatible hash function is used, it will fail
with:
     Error: The file “SOME-FILE” is not in the proper format.
     Incompatible hash function.


File: aspell.info,  Node: Upgrading from Aspell 0.60.7,  Next: Upgrading from Aspell 0.50,  Prev: Using 32-Bit Dictionaries on a 64-Bit System,  Up: Installing

B.6 Upgrading from Aspell 0.60.7
================================

To prevent a potentially unbounded buffer over-read, Aspell no longer
supports null-terminated UCS-2 and UCS-4 encoded strings with the
original C API. Null-terminated 8-bit or UTF-8 encoded strings are still
supported, as are UCS-2 and UCS-4 encoded strings when the length is
passed in.

As of Aspell 0.60.8 a function from the original API that expects an
encoded string as a parameter will return meaningless results (or an
error code) if string is null terminated and the encoding is set to
‘ucs-2’ or ‘ucs-4’.  In addition, a single:
     ERROR: aspell_speller_check: Null-terminated wide-character strings unsupported when used this way.
will be printed to standard error the first time one of those functions
is called.

Application that use null-terminated UCS-2/4 strings should either (1)
use the interface intended for working with wide-characters (*note
Through the C API::); or (2) define ‘ASPELL_ENCODE_SETTING_SECURE’
before including ‘aspell.h’.  In the latter case is is important that
the application explicitly sets the encoding to a known value.  Defining
‘ASPELL_ENCODE_SETTING_SECURE’ and not setting the encoding explicitly
or allowing user of the application to set the encoding could result in
an unbounded buffer over-read.

If it is necessary to preserve binary compatibility with older versions
of Aspell, the easiest thing would be to determine the length of the
UCS-2/4 string—in bytes—and pass that in.  Due to an implementation
detail, existing API functions can be made to work with null-terminated
UCS-2/4 strings safely by passing in either ‘-2’ or ‘-4’ (corresponding
to the width of the character type) as the size.  Doing so, however,
will cause a buffer over-read for unpatched version of Aspell.  To avoid
this it will be necessary to parse the version string to determine the
correct value to use.  However, no official support will be provided for
the latter method.

If the application can not be recompiled, then Aspell can be configured
to preserve the old behavior by passing
‘--enable-sloppy-null-term-strings’ to ‘configure’.  When Aspell is
compiled this way the version string will include the string ‘ SLOPPY’.


File: aspell.info,  Node: Upgrading from Aspell 0.50,  Next: Upgrading from Aspell .33/Pspell .12,  Prev: Upgrading from Aspell 0.60.7,  Up: Installing

B.7 Upgrading from Aspell 0.50
==============================

The dictionary format has changed so dictionaries will need to be
recompiled.

All data, by default, is now included in ‘LIBDIR/aspell-0.60’ so that
multiple versions of Aspell can more peacefully coexist.  This included
both the dictionaries and the language data files which were stored in
‘SHAREDIR/aspell’ before Aspell 0.60.

The format of the character data files has changed.  The new character
data files are installed with Aspell so you should not have to worry
about it unless you made a custom one.

The dictionary option ‘strip-accents’ has been removed.  For this reason
the old English dictionary (up to 0.51) will no longer work.  A new
English dictionary is now available which avoids using this option.  In
addition the ‘ignore-accents’ option is currently unimplemented.

The flag ‘-l’ is now a shortcut for ‘--lang’, instead of ‘--list’ as it
was with Aspell 0.50.

B.7.1 Binary Compatibility
--------------------------

The Aspell 0.60 library is binary compatible with the Aspell 0.50
library.  For this reason I chose _not_ to increment the major version
number (so-name) of the shared library by default which means programs
that were compiled for Aspell 0.50 will also work for Aspell 0.60.
However, this means that having both Aspell 0.50 and Aspell 0.60
installed at the same time can be pragmatic.  If you wish to allow both
Aspell 0.50 and 0.60 to be installed at the same time then you can use
the configure option ‘--incremented-soname’ which will increment
so-name.  You should only use this option if you know what you are
doing.  It is up to you to somehow ensure that both the Aspell 0.50 and
0.60 executables can coexist.

If after incrementing the so-name you wish to allow programs compiled
for Aspell 0.50 to use Aspell 0.60 instead (thus implying that Aspell
0.50 is not installed) then you can use a special compatibility library
which can be found in the ‘lib5’ directory.  This directory will not be
entered when building or installing Aspell so you must manually build
and install this library.  You should build it after the rest of Aspell
is built.  The order in which this library is installed, with relation
to the rest of Aspell, is also important.  If it is installed _after_
the rest of Aspell then new programs will link to the old library (which
will work for Aspell 0.50 or 0.60) when built, if installed _before_,
new programs will link with the new library (Aspell 0.60 only).


File: aspell.info,  Node: Upgrading from Aspell .33/Pspell .12,  Next: Upgrading from a Pre-0.50 snapshot,  Prev: Upgrading from Aspell 0.50,  Up: Installing

B.8 Upgrading from Aspell .33/Pspell .12
========================================

Aspell has undergone an extremely large number of changes since the
previous Aspell/Pspell release.  For one thing Pspell has been merged
with Aspell so there in no longer two separate libraries you have to
worry about.

Because of the massive changes between Aspell/Pspell and Aspell 0.50 you
may want to clean out the old files before installing the the new
Aspell.  To do so do a ‘make uninstall’ in the original Aspell and
Pspell source directories.

The way dictionaries are handled has also changed.  This includes a
change in the naming conventions of both language names and
dictionaries.  Due to the language name change, your old personal
dictionaries will not be recognized.  However, you can import the old
dictionaries by running the ‘aspell-import’ script.  This also means
that dictionaries designed to work with older versions of Aspell are not
likely to function correctly.  Fortunately new dictionary packages are
available for most languages.  You can find them off of the Aspell home
page at <http://aspell.net>.

The Pspell ABI is now part of Aspell except that the name of everything
has changed due to the renaming of Pspell to Aspell.  In particular
please note the following name changes:

     pspell -> aspell
     manager -> speller
     emulation -> enumeration
     master_word_list -> main_word_list

Please also note that the name of the ‘language-tag’ option has changed
to ‘lang’.  However, for backward compatibility the ‘language-tag’
option will still work.

However, you should also be able to build applications that require
Pspell with the new Aspell as a backward compatibility header file is
provided.

Due to a change in the way dictionaries are handled, scanning for
‘.pwli’ files in order to find out which dictionaries are available will
no longer work.  This means that programs that relied on this technique
may have problems finding dictionaries.  Fortunately, GNU Aspell now
provided a uniform way to list all installed dictionaries via the c API.
See the file ‘list-dicts.c’ in the ‘examples/’ directory for an example
of how to do this.  Unfortunately there isn’t any simple way to find out
which dictionaries are installed which will work with both the old
Aspell/Pspell and the new GNU Aspell.


File: aspell.info,  Node: Upgrading from a Pre-0.50 snapshot,  Next: WIN32 Notes,  Prev: Upgrading from Aspell .33/Pspell .12,  Up: Installing

B.9 Upgrading from a Pre-0.50 snapshot
======================================

At the last minute I decided to merge the ‘speller-util’ program into
the main ‘aspell’ program.  You may wish to remove that ‘speller-util’
program to avoid confusion.  This also means that dictionaries designed
to work with the snapshot will no longer work with the official release.


File: aspell.info,  Node: WIN32 Notes,  Prev: Upgrading from a Pre-0.50 snapshot,  Up: Installing

B.10 WIN32 Notes
================

B.10.1 Getting the WIN32 version
--------------------------------

The native Aspell/WIN32 port is no longer being maintained.  The best
way to get Aspell for Windows is to use the MSYS2 binaries.  MSYS2 is
available at <https://www.msys2.org/>.

Binaries for Aspell 0.50 are still available at
<http://aspell.net/win32/> but they are no longer supported.  If you are
interested in updating them for Aspell 0.60 please let me know.

B.10.2 Building the WIN32 version
---------------------------------

There are two basically different ways of building Aspell using GCC for
WIN32: You can either use the Cygwin compiler, which will produce
binaries that depend on the POSIX layer in ‘cygwin1.dll’.  The other way
is using MinGW GCC, those binaries use the native C runtime from
Microsoft (MSVCRT.DLL).

B.10.2.1 Building Aspell using Cygwin
.....................................

This works exactly like on other POSIX compatible systems using the
‘./configure && make && make install’ cycle.  Some versions of Cygwin
GCC will fail to link, this is caused by an incorrect ‘libstdc++.la’ in
the ‘/lib’ directory.  After removing or renaming this file, the build
progress should work (GCC-2.95 and GCC-3.x should work).

B.10.2.2 Building Aspell using MinGW
....................................

There are several different ways to build Aspell using MinGW. The
easiest way is to use a Cygwin compiler but instruct it to build a
native binary rather than a Cygwin one.  To do this configure with:

     ./configure CFLAGS='-O2 -mno-cygwin' CXXFLAGS='-O2 -mno-cygwin'

You may also want to add the option ‘--enable-win32-relocatable’ to use
more windows friendly directories.  *Note Win32-Directories::.  In this
case configure with:

     ./configure CFLAGS='-O2 -mno-cygwin' CXXFLAGS='-O2 -mno-cygwin' --enable-win32-relocatable

It should also be possible to build Aspell using the MSYS environment.
But this has not been very well tested.  If building with MSYS _do not_
add ‘CFLAGS …’ to configure.

B.10.2.3 Building Aspell without using Cygwin or MSYS
.....................................................

It is also possible to build Aspell without Cygwin of MinGW by using the
files in the ‘win32/’ subdirectory.  However, these files have not been
updated to work with Aspell 0.60.  Thus the following instructions will
not work without some effort.  If you do get Aspell to compile this way
please send me the updated files so that I can include them with the
next release.

To compile Aspell with the MinGW compiler, you will need at least
GCC-3.2 (as shipped with MinGW-2.0.3) and some GNU tools like ‘rm’ and
‘cp’.  The origin of those tools doesn’t matter, it has shown to work
with any tools from MinGW/MSys, Cygwin or Linux.  To build Aspell, move
into the ‘win32’ subdirectory and type ‘make’.  You can enable some
additional build options by either commenting out the definitions at the
head of the Makefile or passing those values as environment variables or
at the ‘make’ command line.  Following options are supported:

‘DEBUGVERSION’
     If set to "1", the binaries will include debugging information
     (resulting in a much bigger size).

‘CURSESDIR’
     Enter the path to the pdcurses library here, in order to get a
     nicer console interface (see below).

‘MSVCLIB’
     Enter the filename of MS ‘lib.exe’ here, if you want to build
     libraries that can be imported from MS Visual C++.

‘WIN32_RELOCATABLE’
     If set to "1", Aspell will detect the prefix from the path where
     the DLL resides (see below for further details).

‘TARGET’
     Sets a prefix to be used for cross compilation (e.g.
     ‘/usr/local/bin/i586-mingw32msvc-’ to cross compile from Linux).

There are also a MinGW compilers available for Cygwin and Linux, both
versions are able to compile Aspell using the prebuilt ‘Makefile’.
While the Cygwin port automatically detects the correct compiler, the
Linux version depends on setting the ‘TARGET’ variable in the ‘Makefile’
(or environment) to the correct compiler prefix.

Other compilers may work.  There is a patch for MS Visual C++ 6.0
available at <ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/aspell>, but it needs a lot of
changes to the Aspell sources.  It has also been reported that the Intel
C++ compiler can be used for compilation.

B.10.3 (PD)Curses
-----------------

In order to get the nice full screen interface when spell checking
files, a curses implementation that does not require Cygwin is required.
The PDCurses (<http://pdcurses.sourceforge.net>) implementation is known
to work, other implementations may work however they have not been
tested.  See the previous section for information on specifying the
location of the curses library and include file.

Curses notes:

   • PDcurses built with MinGW needs to be compiled with
     ‘-DPDC_STATIC_BUILD’ to avoid duplicate declaration of ‘DllMain’
     when compiling ‘aspell.exe’.

   • The curses enabled version can cause trouble in some shells (MSys
     ‘rxvt’, ‘emacs’) and will produce errors like ‘initscr() LINES=1
     COLS=1: too small’.  Use a non-curses version for those purposes.

B.10.4 Directories
------------------

If Aspell is configured with ‘--enable-win32-relocatable’ or compiled
with ‘WIN32_RELOCATABLE=1’ when using a Makefile, it can be run from any
directory: it will set ‘PREFIX’ according to its install location
(assuming it resides in ‘PREFIX\\bin’).  Your personal wordlists will be
saved in the ‘PREFIX’ directory with their names changed from
‘.aspell.LANG.*’ to ‘LANG.*’ (you can override the path by setting the
‘HOME’ environment variable).

B.10.5 Installer
----------------

The installer registers the DLLs as shared libraries, you should
increase the reference counter to avoid the libraries being uninstalled
if your application still depends on them (and decrease it again when
uninstalling your program).  The reference counters are located under:
     HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\SharedDLLs

The install location and version numbers are stored under

     HKLM\SOFTWARE\Aspell

B.10.6 WIN32 consoles
---------------------

The console uses a different encoding than GUI applications, changing
this to to a Windows encoding (e.g.  1252) is not supported on Win9x/Me.
On WinNT (and later) those codepages can be set by first changing the
console font to ‘lucida console’, then changing the codepage using ‘chcp
1252’.

Some alternative shells (e.g.  MSys’ ‘rxvt’ or Cygwin’s ‘bash’) do a
codepage conversion (if correctly set up), so running Aspell inside
those shells might be a workaround for Win9x.


File: aspell.info,  Node: ChangeLog,  Next: Authors,  Prev: Installing,  Up: Top

Appendix C ChangeLog
********************

Changes from 0.60.8.1 to 0.60.8.2 (January 27, 2026)
====================================================

   • Improved compiler compatibility: Fixed Clang -Wstrict-prototypes
     warnings for C interface, fixed new Clang warnings, fixed GCC 15
     build issues, and added MSYS2 + MINGW64 compile fixes.
   • Enhanced testing infrastructure with newer compiler versions,
     including snapshots from both GCC and Clang, to catch future
     problems before they make their way into distros.
   • Fixed bug that caused aspell_speller_store_replacement to return
     random values.
   • Fixed typo in Texinfo filter option file.
   • Various documentation updates and fixes.

Changes from 0.60.8 to 0.60.8.1 (December 19, 2023)
===================================================

   • Fix memory leak in suggestion code introduced in 0.60.8.
   • Various documentation fixes.
   • Fix various warnings when compiling with -Wall.
   • Fix two buffer overflows found by Google’s OSS-Fuzz.
   • Other minor updates.

Changes from 0.60.7 to 0.60.8 (October 12, 2019)
================================================

   • Prevent a potentially unbounded buffer over-read by no longer
     supporting null-terminated UCS-2 and UCS-4 encoded strings with the
     original C API. *Note Upgrading from Aspell 0.60.7::.
   • Ensure that possible typos are listed before other suggestions when
     typo analysis is used.  Also fix a bug so that suggestions that
     split a word using a space or hyphen are not always first.
   • Add Markdown filter.
   • Add new ‘wordlists’ option, which is a list of UTF-8 files that
     contain additional words to accept.
   • Add new ‘camel-case’ option, which enables support for checking
     camelCase words.
   • Sort personal and replacement dictionaries.
   • Change ‘ultra’ suggestion mode to only find words that are within
     one-edit distance or have the same soundslike.
   • Implement the ‘aspell filter’ command.
   • Fix a bug in ‘AspellDocumentChecker’ that prevented it from working
     with UCS-2 and UCS-4 encoded strings.
   • Remove unused ‘sug-edit-dist’ option.
   • ‘AspellDocumentChecker’ now expects the document a line at a time
     in order to work with the new Markdown filter.  If the document is
     split on white space characters instead, nothing will break, but
     new filters such as the Markdown filter may give incorrect results.
   • The ‘clean’ option and command will no longer split a word.
   • Various documentation improvements.
   • Removal of several outdated appendices that don’t really belong in
     the main manual.  Parts that are still relevant may eventually be
     moved elsewhere, but for now they are available online at
     <http://aspell.net/0.60.7/man-html/>.
   • Fix various crashes and other problems found by Google’s OSS-Fuzz.

Changes from 0.60.6.1 to 0.60.7 (July 29, 2019)
===============================================

   • Add partial support for recognizing the Unicode apostrophe (’) in
     words.  In particular Aspell will accept the Unicode apostrophe
     when the language uses an ISO Latin charset that doesn’t already
     have a Unicode apostrophe.  For now, Aspell will still use the
     ASCII version in suggestions.
   • Detect when a dictionary compiled on a 32-bit machine is used on a
     64-bit one (and vise versa), as due to an oversight, compiled
     dictionaries depend on more than the endianness.  Also added a
     compile time option to remove this dependency, but at the cost of
     breaking compatibility with already compiled dictionaries on 64-bit
     systems.
   • Fix a bug which caused Aspell to crash when passing in a null
     string to almost any of the C API functions.  This should not
     happen if the size is also zero as the pointer should never be
     derefrenced.
   • Fix a bug that caused Aspell to crash with a SEGFAULT when built
     with mingw-w64.
   • In addition to outputting a warning when building with NDEBUG
     defined, also include NDEBUG in the version string.
   • Various compile fixes for newer version of Gcc and Clang.
   • Fix VPATH builds.
   • Use utf-8 encoding for manual instead of iso-8859-1.
   • Other minor updates and bug fixes.

Changes from 0.60.6 to 0.60.6.1 (July 4, 2011)
==============================================

   • Update to Automake 1.10.3
   • Fix a bug which caused a race condition (leading to a likely crash)
     when two threads try to update the dictionary cache at the same
     time.
   • Make it very clear that compiling Aspell with NDEBUG is a bad idea
     (see <http://aspell.net/ndebug.html>) by outputting a warning when
     building with NDEBUG defined.
   • Numerous other minor updates and bug fixes.

Changes from 0.60.5 to 0.60.6 (April 16, 2007)
==============================================

   • Compile fixes for Gcc 4.3.
   • Updated to Libtool 2.2.2 and Automake 1.10.1
   • Minor tweak to suggestion code which improved suggestion results in
     certain cases.
   • Always line buffer stdout and stderr in the Aspell utility when
     there is the potential for it to be used interactively through a
     pipe.
   • Removed debug output in ‘aspell munch-list’.
   • Other minor updates and bug fixes.

Changes from 0.60.4 to 0.60.5 (December 18, 2006)
=================================================

   • Compile fix for Gcc 4.1
   • Updated to Gettext 0.16.1, Libtool 1.5.22, Automake 1.10, Autoconf
     2.61
   • Documentation improvements, including an updated ‘man’ page.
   • Complain if more than one file is specified when checking files
     using the ‘aspell check’ command, rather than ignoring the other
     files.
   • Large number of bug fixes.

Changes from 0.60.3 to 0.60.4 (October 19, 2005)
================================================

   • Fixed a bug that caused Aspell to crash when checking certain
     Russian words, this bug likely affected other languages as well.
   • Updated to Gettext 0.14.5 which is required for AMD64, also updated
     to to Libtool 1.5.20.
   • Fixed an alignment bug which caused mmap to always fail when
     reading in dictionaries.
   • Added note about how ‘make clean’ will remove the HTML manuals.
   • Added manual page for prezip-bin and enhanced word-list-compress
     manual page thanks to the work of Jose Da Silva.
   • Other minor updates and bug fixes.

Changes from 0.60.2 to 0.60.3 (June 28, 2005)
=============================================

   • Fixed bugs involving several of the C API functions.
   • Fixed bug where ‘ultra’ or ‘fast’ mode would not return any
     suggestions when soundslike lookup was not used.
   • Made a minor, yet significant, optimization to the suggestion code.
     This sped things up by an order of magnitude in some cases.
   • Avoid using the slow ngram scan except when the ‘sug-mode’ is
     ‘slow’ or ‘bad-speller’.
   • Fixed a bug in curses mode which caused word-wrap to not work
     correctly in some cases.
   • Fixed a bug in pipe mode with a missing newline.
   • Fixed the ‘spell’ compatibility script.
   • Several other minor bugs fixed.
   • Made note about the change in behavior of the ‘-l’ command line
     switch.
   • Other manual update/fixes.
   • Updated to Libtool 1.5.18, Automake 1.9.6, and Makeinfo 4.8.

Changes from 0.60.1 to 0.60.2 (December 18, 2004)
=================================================

   • Added the ‘munch-list’ command to the Aspell utility.  The ‘munch’
     program in the ‘myspell/’ directory will disappear in Aspell 0.61.
     The ‘munchlist’ script will also likely disappear or be replaced
     when Aspell 0.61 is released since it doesn’t work correctly
     anyway.
   • Several important bug fixes some of which rendered some non-English
     languages unusable.
   • Other minor changes.

Changes from 0.60.1 to 0.60.1.1 (November 20, 2004)
===================================================

   • Fix bug involving checking of capitalized word when affix
     compression is used.
   • Compile fixes.
   • Added an option to disable using the “wide” curses version in case
     it causes compile problems.
   • Minor manual updates
   • Avoided including some unnecessary files in the distribution.

Changes from 0.60 to 0.60.1 (November 7, 2004)
==============================================

   • Lots of compile fixes for various platforms.
   • Miscellaneous bug fixes.
   • Added Nroff filter thanks to Sergey Poznyakoff.
   • The default filter mode when in pipe mode is now nroff for
     compatibility with Ispell.
   • Added Texinfo filter.
   • Added a section detailing the differences between Ispell and
     Aspell.
   • Updated the section on thread safety.
   • Other miscellaneous manual changes such as updating the To Do and
     Authors section.

Changes from 0.50.5 to 0.60 (August 27, 2004)
=============================================

   • Added support for Affix Compression.  Affix compression stores the
     root word and then a list of prefixes and suffixes that the word
     can take, and thus saves a lot of space.  The codebase comes from
     MySpell found in OpenOffice.  It uses the same affix file that
     OpenOffice (and Mozilla) use.  Affix compression will even work
     with soundslike lookup to a limited extent.
   • Added support for accepting all input and printing all output in
     UTF-8 or some other encoding different from the one Aspell uses.
     This includes support for Unicode normalization.  Aspell can now
     support any language with no more than 210 distinct characters,
     including different capitalizations and accents, _even if_ there is
     not an existing 8-bit encoding that supports the language.
   • Added support for loadable filters and customizable filter modes
     thanks to Christoph Hintermüller.
   • Enhanced SGML filter to also support skipping sgml tags such as
     "script" blocks thanks to Tom Snyder.
   • Added gettext support thanks to Sergey Poznyakoff
   • Reworked the compiled dictionary format.  Compiled dictionaries now
     take up less space (less than 80% for the English language) and
     creating them is significantly faster (over 4 times for the English
     language).
   • Reworked suggestion code.  It is significantly faster when dealing
     with short words (up to 10 times).  Also added support for MySpell
     Replacement Tables and n-gram lookup.  In addition, added basic
     support for compound words.
   • Manual has has been converted to texinfo format thanks to the work
     of Chris Martin.
   • Reworked the build system so that a single Makefile is used for
     most of the code.
   • All data, by default, is now included in ‘LIBDIR/aspell-0.60’.
     Also added a built time option to increment the major version
     number of the shared library.  This should allow both Aspell
     version 0.50 and 0.60 to coexist.  The major version number is
     _not_ incremented by default as Aspell 0.60 is binary compatible
     with Aspell 0.50.  *Note Binary Compatibility::.
   • The code to handle dictionaries has been rewritten.  Because of
     this support for the dictionary option ‘strip-accents’ has been
     removed.  In addition the ‘ignore-accents’ option is currently
     unimplemented.
   • Lots of other minor changes due to massive overhaul of the source
     code.

Changes from 0.50.4.1 to 0.50.5 (Feb 10, 2004)
==============================================

   • Reworked url filter which fixed several bugs and now accepts
     "bla.bla/kdkdl" as a url.
   • Fixed bug in which the url filter was coming before all other
     filters when it was supposed to come after.  This solved a number
     of problems where the url filter was interfering with other
     filters.
   • Small bug fix in SGML filter.
   • Added code page charsets, ie cp125?.dat.
   • Added natural (split) keyboard data file as "split.kbd"
   • Compile fixes for the upcoming Gcc 3.4
   • Removed Solaris link hack as it was causing more problems than it
     fixes.
   • Compile fixes for Sun WorkShop 6 compiler, but there may still be
     some problems, especially with linking.
   • Included patch to help compile with Microsoft Visual C++ 6.
   • Minor manual fixes.
   • Updated the TODO section to reflect the current progress with the
     next major version of Aspell (0.51).
   • Updated to Autoconf 2.59, Automake 1.82, and Libtool 1.5.2.

Changes from 0.50.4 to 0.50.4.1 (Oct 11, 2003)
==============================================

   • Fixed major bug in pipe mode which caused the last character to be
     chopped off words before they were stored.
   • Minor formating fixes in the manual.

Changes from 0.50.3 to 0.50.4 (Sep 26, 2003)
============================================

   • Minor changes in URL filter to avoid treating the double quote
     character as part of the URL, and to avoid treating words ending in
     more than one period as a URL.

   • Document fixes in Aspell API

   • Small compile fixes, including one for GCC 3.3

   • Updated Win32 section since a port now exists thanks to Thorsten
     Maerz.

   • Complain instead of doing nothing or aborting for unimplemented
     functions in Aspell utility.

   • Portability bug fixes.

   • Upgraded to Autoconf 2.57, Automake 1.7.7, Libtool 1.5 (no longer
     use CVS version of libtool).

Changes from 0.50.2 to 0.50.3 (Nov 23, 2002)
============================================

   • Hopefully fixed the Ispell alignment error problem when Aspell is
     used with ispell.el.

   • Fixed a problem with personal dictionaries on NFS mounted home
     directories.

   • Compiled libaspell-common directory into libaspell for now to avoid
     forcing applications to relink whenever a new Aspell version is out
     which was due to the use of the libtool ’-release’ flag.

   • Fixed Makefiles so that Aspell can be built outside the source tree
     (i.e.  with VPATH).

   • Updated the section on compiling with Win32.

   • Updated to Autoconf 2.56.

Changes from 0.50.1 to 0.50.2 (Sep 28, 2002)
============================================

   • Fixed a number of bugs in Ispell compatibility mode

   • Fixed a number of bugs with the handling of replacement pairs

   • Other miscellaneous bug fixes

   • Additional Win32 portability fixes

   • Added the Ukrainian KOI8-U charset.

Changes from 0.50 to 0.50.1 (Aug 28, 2002)
==========================================

   • A rather large number of portability fixes for non GNU/Linux
     platforms.

   • Fixed pkglibdir and pkgdatadir in configure.

   • Reintroduced some configure options from Aspell .33.7 included
     dict-dir, data-dir, curses, curses-include, win32-relocatable.

   • Fixed Aspell so it will now compile with -O3 when using gcc.

   • Updated note on Win32 support.

   • Other minor manual improvements.

   • Portability fixes in dictionary files

   • Official dictionary package for the Slovak language.

Changes from .33.7.1 to 0.50 (Aug 23, 2002)
===========================================

   • A complete overhaul of the source code which included merging
     Pspell into Aspell.

   • Changed the way dictionaries and languages are handled.

   • Added Dvorak keymap.

   • Added the ability to list the available dictionaries

   • Improved the spell checking interface a bit.

   • Added support for using the Ispell keymapping when checking files.

   • Complete rewrite of the filter interface.  It should now be fairly
     easy to add new filters to Aspell.

   • Added some preliminary developer documentation.

   • Lots of other changes due to the massive overhaul of the source
     code.

Changes from .33.7 to .33.7.1 (Aug 20, 2001)
============================================

   • Minor manual fixes.

   • Compile fix for Gcc 3.0 and Solaris.

Changes from .33.6.3 to .33.7 (Aug 2, 2001)
===========================================

   • Updates to Autoconf 2.50 and switched to the HEAD branch of
     libtools.

   • Fixed a bug which caused Aspell to crash when typo-analysis was not
     used such as when sug-mode is *fast* or *bad spellers*.

   • Added support for typo-analysis even when a soundslike was not
     used.

   • Fixed a bug which causes extended charters to display incorrectly
     on some platforms

   • Compile fixes so that it will compile with Gcc 3.0.

   • Compile fixed which should allow Aspell to compile with Egcs 1.1.
     I have not been able to actually test it though.  Please let me
     know at kevina@users.sourceforge.net if you have tried with Egcs
     1.1.

   • Compile and configuration script fixes so that USE_FILE_INO will
     properly be defined and Aspell will compile correctly when it is
     defined.

   • More ANSI C++ compliance fixes.

Changes from .33.6.2 to .33.6.3 (June 3, 2001)
==============================================

   • Fixed a build problem in the manual/ directory by including
     manual-text and manual-html in the distribution.

Changes from .33.6.1 to .33.6.2 (June 3, 2001)
==============================================

   • Compile fix so that Aspell will work correctly when not installed
     in /usr/local.

   • Avoided regenerating the manual unless configured with
     enable-maintainer-mode.

   • Added the missing documentation files in the scowl directory.

Changes from .33.6 to .33.6.1 (May 29, 2001)
============================================

   • Fixed a formating problem with the manual involving <.

   • Added a note about creating pwli files.

   • Removed the space after between the -L and the directory name in
     the pspell-module/Makefile which caused problems on some platforms.

   • Added the configure option AM_MAINTAINER_MODE to avoid enabling
     rules which often causes generated build files to be rebuilt with
     the wrong version of Libtool by default.  I don’t know why I didn’t
     think to do this a long time ago.

Changes from .33.5 to .33.6 (May 18, 2001)
==========================================

   • Fixed a minor bug where some words would have random compound tags
     attached to them.

   • Fixed a compile problem on many platforms where fileno is defined
     as a macro.

   • Updated the description for a few of Aspell’s options.

   • Removed the note of Aspell not being able to run when compiled with
     the upcoming Gcc 3.0 compiler as things seam to work now.

   • Added a note about Aspell not being able to compile with Egcs 1.1.

   • Added hack to deal with Libtool’s interdependencies problem.  See
     bug #416981 for Pspell for more info.

Changes from .33 to .33.5 (April 5, 2001)
=========================================

   • *dump master* correctly detects which dictionary and language to
     use based on the ‘LANG’ environment variable.

   • Fixed a problem on Win32 which involves path names that began with
     <Drive Letter>:.

   • Bug fixes and enhancements so that Aspell can once again run under
     MinGW. You can even use the new full screen interface if Aspell is
     compiled with PDCurses.

   • Some major modifications to make Aspell more C++ compliant in order
     to get Aspell to compile under the upcoming Gcc 3.0 compiler.  This
     included only using STL features found in the standard version of
     C++.  (Which means Aspell will no longer require using the SGI
     version of the STL) This should also make compiling C++ under
     non-gcc compilers a lot simpler.  Please note that Aspell still has
     some problems with the upcoming Gcc 3.0 compiler.

   • Minor changes to remove some -Wall warnings.

   • Added a hack so that Aspell would properly compile as a shared
     library under Solaris.

   • Added a few important missing words to the English word list.

Changes from .32.6 to .33 (January 28, 2001)
============================================

   • Added a new new curses based interface to replace the dumb terminal
     interface everyone has been bitching about.

   • Added the ability to give higher priority to words such as "the"
     instead of "teh" which are likely to be due to typos.

   • Reorganized the manual so that it is hopefully easier to follow.

   • Ability to automatically select the best dictionary to use based on
     the setting of the ‘LANG’ environment variable.

   • Expanded the medium dictionary size to include more words which
     included the original words found in Ispell and eliminated the
     large size for now.

   • Added three special variant add-on dictionaries.

   • Switched to the multi-language branch of the CVS version of
     libtool.

Changes from .32.5 to .32.6 (Nov 8, 2000)
=========================================

   • Fixed a bug where Aspell would crash when reading-in accented
     characters on some platforms.  This fixed bug # 112435.

   • Fixed some other bugs so that it will run under Win32 under CygWin.
     Unfortunately it still won’t run properly under Mingw.

   • Fixed the mmap test in configure so that it won’t fail on some
     platforms that use munmap(char *, int) instead of munmap(void *,
     int).

   • Upgraded to the latest CVS version of libtool which fixed the
     problem with using GNU Make under Solaris.

   • Added an option to copy files instead of using symbolic links for
     the special *multi* dictionary files.

Changes from .32.1 to .32.5 (August 18, 2000)
=============================================

   • Changed my email from kevinatk at home com to kevina at users
     sourceforge net please make a note of the new email address.

   • Added an option to control if the personal replacement dictionary
     is saved when the save_all_wls method is called.

   • Brought back the ability to dump the master word list even in the
     case of the special *multi* lists.

   • Added a large number of hacker related words and some other slang
     terms to the medium size word list.

   • Added an *ispell* and *spell* compatibility script for systems
     which don’t have Ispell installed.  They are located in the
     scripts/ directory and are not installed by default.

   • Manual fixes.

   • Added a note on not using GNU Make on Solaris.

Changes from .32 to .32.1 (August 5, 2000)
==========================================

   • Minor compile fixes for recent gcc snapshot.

   • Fixed naming of pwli files.

   • Fixed a bug when Aspell will crash when used with certain single
     letter flags.  This bug was most noticeable when used with Emacs.

   • Word list changes, see SCOWL Readme.

   • Other miscellaneous changes.

Changes from .31.1 to .32 (July 23, 2000)
=========================================

   • Added support for optionally doing without the soundslike data.

   • Greatly reduced the amount of memory used when creating word lists.

   • Added support for ignoring accents when coming up with suggestions.

   • Added support for local-data-dir which is searched before data-dir.

   • Added support for specifying which words may be used in compounds
     and where they may be used.

   • Added support for having more than one main word list as well as a
     special *multi* word list files which will allow multiple word
     lists to be treated as one.

   • Aspell now uses a completely new word list.

   • The apostrophe (’) is no longer considered part of the word when it
     as at the end of the word such as in ‘dogs'’.

Changes from .31 to .31.1 (June 18, 2000)
=========================================

   • Fixed a bug where Aspell would not create a complete dictionary
     file on some platforms when the data is 8-bit.

   • Added a workaround so Aspell will work with ispell.el 3.3.

   • Minor compile fixes so it would compile better with the very latest
     gcc (CVS Version).

   • Removed note about compiling in Win32 as I was now able to get it
     to work.

Changes from .30.1 to .31 (June 11, 2000)
=========================================

   • Added support for spell checking run together words.

   • Added an option to produce a list of misspelled words from standard
     input.

   • More robust error reporting when reading in language data files.

   • Fixed a bug that would cause Aspell to crash if the *special* line
     was not defined in the language data file.

   • Updated Pspell Module.

   • Minor bug fixes.

   • Added cross references in “The Aspell Utility Chapter” for easier
     use.

Changes from .30 to .30.1 (April 29, 2000)
==========================================

   • Ported Aspell to Win32 platforms.

   • Portability fixes which may help Aspell compile on other platforms.

   • Aspell will no longer fail if for some reason the mmap fails,
     instead it will just read the file in as normal and free the memory
     when done.

   • Minor changes in the format of the main word list as a result of
     the changes, the old format should still work in most cases.

   • Fixed a bug where Aspell was ignoring the extension of file names
     such as .html or .tex when checking files.

   • Fixed a bug where Aspell will go into an infinite loop when
     creating the main word list from a word list which has duplicates
     in it.

   • Minor changes to the manual for better clarity.

Changes from .29.1 to .30 (April 2, 2000)
=========================================

   • Fixed many of the capitalization bugs found in previous versions of
     Aspell.

   • Changed the format of the main word list yet again.

   • Fixed a bug so that ‘aspell check’ will work on the PowerPC.

   • Added ability to change configuration options in the middle of a
     session.

   • Added words from /usr/dict/words found on most Linux systems as
     well as a bunch of commonly used abbreviations to the word list.

   • Fixed a bug where Aspell would dump core after reporting certain
     errors when compiled with gcc 2.95 or higher.  This involved
     reworking the Exception heritage to get around a bug in gcc 2.95.

   • Added a few more commands to the list of default commands the TeX
     filter knows about.

   • Aspell will now check if a word only contains valid characters
     before adding it to any dictionaries.  This might mean that you
     have to manually delete a few words from your personal word list.

   • Added option to ignore case when checking a document.

   • Adjusted the parameters of the *normal* suggest mode to so that
     significantly less far fetched results are returned in cases such
     as tomatoe, which went from 100 suggestions down to 32, at the
     expense of getting slightly lower results (less than 1%),

   • Improved the edit distance algorithm for slightly faster results.

   • Removed the ‘$$m’ command in pipe mode, you should now use ‘$$cs
     mode,MODE’ to set the mode and *$$cr mode* to find out the current
     mode.

   • Reworked parts of Aspell to use Pspell services to avoid
     duplicating code.

   • Added a module for the newly released Pspell.  It will get
     installed with the rest of Aspell.

   • Miscellaneous other bug fixes.

Changes from .29 to .29.1 (Feb 18, 2000)
========================================

   • Improved the TeX filter so that it will accept ’@’ at the beginning
     of a command name and ignored trailing ’*’s.  It also now has
     better defaults for which parameters to skip.

   • Reworked the main dictionary so that it can be memory mapped in.
     This decreases startup time and allows multiple Aspell processes to
     use the same memory for the main word list.  This also also made
     Aspell 64 bit clean so that it should work on an alpha now.

   • Fix so that Aspell could compile on platforms that gnu is not yet
     available for.

   • Fixed issue with flock so it would compile on FreeBSD.

   • Minor changes in the code to make it more C++ compliant although I
     am sure there will still be problems when using some other compiler
     other than gcc or egcs.

   • Added some comments to the header files to better document a few of
     the classes.

Changes from .28.3 to .29 (Feb 6, 2000)
=======================================

   • Fixed a bug in the pipe mode with lines that start with ‘^$$’.

   • Added support for ignoring all words less than or equal to a
     specified length

   • New soundslike code based thanks to the contribution of Björn
     Jacke.  It now gets all of its data from a table making it easier
     for other people to add soundslike code for their native language.
     He also converted the metaphone algorithm to table form,
     eliminating the need for the old metaphone code.

   • Major redesign of the suggestion code for better results.

   • Changed the format of the personal word lists.  In most cases it
     should be converted automatically.

   • Changed the format of the main word list.

   • Name space cleanup for more consistent naming.  I now use name
     spaces which means that gcc 2.8.* and egcs 1.0.* will no longer cut
     it.

   • Used file locks when reading and saving the personal dictionaries
     so that it truly multiprocesses safely.

   • Added rudimentary filter support.

   • Reworked the configuration system once again.  However, the changes
     to the end user who does not directly use my library should be
     minimal.

   • Rewrote my code that handles parsing command line parameters so
     that it no longer used popt as it was causing too many problems and
     didn’t integrate well with my new configuration system.

   • Fixed pipe mode so that it will properly ignore lines starting with
     ’~’ for better Ispell compatibility.

   • Aspell now has a new home page at <http://aspell.sourceforge.net/>.
     Please make note of the new URL.

   • Miscellaneous manual fixes and clarifications.

Changes from .28.2.1 to .28.3 (Nov 20, 1999)
============================================

   • Fixed a bug that caused Aspell to crash when spell checking words
     over 60 characters long.

   • Reworked *aspell check* so that
       1. You no longer have to hit enter when making a choice.

       2. It will now overwrite the original file instead of creating a
          new file.  An optional backup can be made by using the -b
          option.

   • Fixed a few bugs in data.cc.

Changes from .28.2 to .28.2.1 (Aug 25, 1999)
============================================

   • Fixed the version number for the shared library.

   • Fixed a problem with undefined references when linking to the
     shared library.

Changes from .28.1 to .28.2 (Aug 25, 1999)
==========================================

   • Fixed a bunch of bugs in the language and configuration classes.

   • Minor changes in the code so that it could compile with the new gcc
     2.95(.1).

   • Changed the output of ‘dump config’ so that default values are
     given the value ‘<default>’.  This means that the output can be
     used to create a configuration file.

   • Added notes on using Aspell with VIM.

Changes from .28 to .28.1 (July 27, 1999)
=========================================

   • Removed some debug output

   • Changed notes on compiling with gcc 2.8.* as I managed to get it to
     compile on my school account

   • Avoided including *stdexcept* in ‘const_string.hh’ so that I could
     get Aspell to compile on my school account with gcc 2.8.1.

Changes from .27.2 to .28 (July 25, 1999)
=========================================

     Provided an iterator for the replacement classes.

   • Added support for dumping and creating and merging the personal and
     replacement word lists.

   • Changed the Aspell utility command line a bit, it now used popt.

   • Totally reworked Aspell configuration system.  Now Aspell could get
     configuration from any of 5 sources: the command line, the
     environment variable ‘ASPELL_CONF’, the personal configuration
     file, the global configuration file, and finally the compiled-in
     defaults.

   • Totally reworked the language class in preparation for my new
     language code.  See <http://aspell.sourceforge.net/international/>
     for more information of what I have in store.

   • Added some options to the configure script: –enable-dict-dir=DIR,
     –enable-doc-dir=DIR, –enable-debug, and –enable-opt

   • Removed some old header files.

   • Reorganized the directory structure a bit

   • Made the text version of the manual pages slightly easier to read

   • Used the ‘\url’ command for urls for better formating of the
     printed version.

Changes from .27.1 to .27.2 (Mar 1, 1999)
=========================================

   • Fixed a major bug that caused Aspell to dump core when used without
     any arguments

   • Fixed another major bug that caused Aspell to do nothing when used
     in interactive mode.

   • Added an option to exit in Aspell’s interactive mode.

   • Removed some old documentation files from the distribution.

   • Minor changes to the the section on using Aspell with egcs.

   • Minor changes to remove -Wall warnings.

Changes from .27 to .27.1 (Feb 24, 1999)
========================================

   • Fixed a minor compile problem.

   • Updated the section on using Aspell with egcs to it.  It was now
     more clear why the patch was necessary.

Changes from .26.2 to .27 (Feb 22, 1999)
========================================

   • Totally reworked the C++ library which means you may need to change
     some things in your code.

   • Added support for detachable and multiple personal dictionaries in
     the C++ class library.

   • The C++ class library now throws exceptions.

   • Reworked Aspell ability to learn from users misspellings a bit so
     that it now has a memory.  For more information see *note Notes on
     Storing Replacement Pairs::.

   • Upgraded autoconf to version 2.13 and automake to version 1.4 for
     better portability.

   • Fixed the configuration so the ‘make dist’ will work.  From now on
     Aspell will be distributed with ‘make dist’.

   • Added support to skip over URL’s, email addresses and host names.

   • Added support for dumping the master and personal word list.  You
     can now also merge a personal word list.  Type aspell -help for
     help on using this feature.

   • Reorganized the source code.

   • Started using proper version numbers for the shared library.

   • Fixed a bug that caused Aspell to crash when adding certain
     replacement pairs.

   • Fixed the problem with duplicate lines when exiting pipe mode for
     good.

Changed from .26.1 to .26.2 (Jan 3, 1998)
=========================================

   • Fixed another compile problem.  Hopefully this time it will really
     compile OK on other peoples machines.

Changed from .26 to .26.1 (Jan 3, 1998)
=======================================

   • Fixed a small compile problem in ‘as_data.cc’.

Changed from .25.1 to .26 (Jan 3, 1999)
=======================================

   • Fixed a bug that caused duplicate items to be displayed in the
     suggestion list for good.  (If it still does it please send me
     email.)

   • Added the ability for Aspell to learn form the users misspellings.

   • Library Interface changes.  Still more to come ….

   • Is now multiprocess safe.  When a personal dictionary (or
     replacement list) is saved it will now first update the list
     against the dictionary on disk in case another process modified it.

   • Fixed the bug that caused duplicate output when used non
     interactively in pipe mode.

   • Dropped support for gcc 2.7.2 as the C++ compiler.

   • Updated the How Aspell Works (*note Aspell Suggestion Strategy::.)

   • Added support for the ‘ASPELL_DATA_DIR’ environment variable.

Changes from .25 to .25.1 (Dec 10, 1998)
========================================

   • Fixed the version number so that Aspell reports the correct version
     number.

   • Changed the note on gcc 2.7.2 compilers to make it clear that only
     the C++ compiler cannot be gcc 2.7.2, it is OK if the C compiler is
     gcc 2.7.2.

   • Updated the TODO list and reorganized it a bit.

   • Fixed the directory so that all the documentation will get
     installed in ${prefix}/doc/aspell instead of half of it in
     ${prefix}/doc/aspell and half of it in ${prefix}/doc/kspell.

Changes from .24 to .25 (Nov 23, 1998)
======================================

   • Total rework of how the main word list is stored.  Start up time
     decreased to about 1/3 of what it was in .24 and memory usage
     decreased to about 2/3.  (When used with the provided word list on
     a Linux system).

     Also the format and default locations of the main word list data
     files changed in the process and the data is now machine dependent.
     The personal word list format, however, stayed the same.

   • Changed the scoring method to produce slightly better results with
     words like the vs.  teh.  And other simpler misspellings where two
     letters are swapped.

   • Fixed the very unpredictable behavior of the ‘*’, ‘&’, ‘@’ commands
     in the pipe mode.

   • Added documentations for Aspell pipe mode (also known as ‘ispell
     -a’ compatibility mode)

   • Added a bunch of Aspell specific extensions to the pipe mode and
     documented them.

   • Documented the ‘to_soundslike’ and ‘soundslike’ methods for the
     ‘aspell’ class.

   • Changed the scoring method to produce better results for words like
     _fone_ vs _phone_ and other words that have a spelling that doesn’t
     directly relate to how the word sounds by using the phoneme
     equivalent of the word in the scoring of it.

   • Added the ‘to_phoneme’ and ‘have_phoneme’ methods to the
     ‘SC_Language’ class.

   • Added the ‘to_phoneme’ method to the ‘aspell’ class.

   • Added the framework for being able to learn from the users
     misspelling.  Right now it just keeps a log of replacements.

   • Redid ‘stl_rope-30.diff’.  For some reason the version of patch on
     my system refused it.

   • Rewrite of the “_Using as a replacement for Ispell_” section and
     added the ‘run-with-aspell’ utility as a replacement of the old
     method of mapping Ispell to Aspell.

   • Fixed a bug that caused duplicate words to appear in the suggestion
     list.

Changes from .23 to .24 (Nov 8, 1998)
=====================================

   • Fixed my code so that it can once again compile with g++ 2.7.2.

   • Rewrote the How It Works chapter.

   • Rewrote the Requirement section and added notes on compiling with
     g++ 2.7.2.

   • Added a To Do chapter.

   • Added a Glossary and References chapter.

   • Other minor documentation improvements.

   • Internal code documentation improvements.

Changes from .22.1 to .23 (Oct 31, 1998)
========================================

   • Minor documentation fixes.

   • Changed the scoring strategy for words with 3 or less letters.
     This cut the number of words returned for these roughly in half.

   • Expanded the word list to also include *american.0* and
     *american.1* from the Ispell distribution.  It now includes
     *english.0*, *english.1*, *american.0* and *american.1* from the
     directory ‘languages/english’ provided with Ispell 3.1.20.

   • Added a link to the location of the latest Ispell.el in the
     documentation.

   • Started a C interface and added some rough documentation for it.

Changes from .22 to .22.1 (Oct 27, 1998)
========================================

   • Minor bug fixes.  I was deleting arrays with delete rather than
     delete[].  I was suprised that this had not created a problem.

   • Added a simple test program to test for a memory leak present on
     some systems.  (Only debian slink at the moment.)  See the file
     memleak-test.cc for more info.

Changes from .21 to .22 (Oct 26, 1998)
======================================

   • Major redesign of the scoring method.  It now uses absolute
     distances rather than relative scores for more consistent results.
     See ‘suggest.cc’ for more info.

   • Suggest code rewritten in several places, however the core process
     stayed the same.

   • The ‘suggest_ultra’ method temporarily does nothing.  It should be
     working again by the next release.

Changes from .20 to .21 (Oct 13, 1998)
======================================

   • Added documentation for aspell::Error

   • 
     Changed the library name from ‘libspell’ to ‘libaspell’.  It should
     never have been ‘libspell’ in the first place.  Sorry for the
     incompatibility.

   • Added ‘as_error.hh’ to the list of files copied to the include
     directory so that you can actually use the library outside of the
     source dir.

   • Fixed bug that caused a segmentation fault with words where the
     only suggestions was inserting a space or hyphen such as in
     *ledgerline*.

   • Added the *score* method to ‘aspell’.

   • Changed the scoring method to deal with word when the user uses "f"
     in place of "ph" a lot better.

Changes from .11 to .20 (Oct 10, 1998)
======================================

   • _Name change_.  Everything that was Kspell is now Aspell.  Sorry,
     the name Kspell was already used by KDE and I didn’t want to cause
     any confusion.

   • Fixed a bug that causes a segmentation fault when the ‘HOME’
     environment variable doesn’t exist.

Changes from .10 to .11 (Sep 12, 1998)
======================================

   • Overhaul of the SC_Language class

   • Added documentation for international support

   • Added documentation for the C++ library

   • Other minor bug fixes.


File: aspell.info,  Node: Authors,  Next: Copying,  Prev: ChangeLog,  Up: Top

Appendix D Authors
******************

The following people or companies have contributed a non-trival amount
of code to Aspell and thus own the Copyright to part of Aspell.

Jose Da Silva
     Bug fixes and enhancements to ‘word-list-compress’.

Sergey Poznyakoff
     Wrote the Nroff filter.

Tom Snyder
     Enhanced the SGML filter to also support skipping sgml tags such as
     "script" blocks.

Kevin B. Hendricks (and Contributors)
     Wrote MySpell which is a simple spell checker library that supports
     affix compression.  Aspell affix compression code is based on his
     code.

Christoph Hintermüller
     Added support for loadable filters.

Melvin Hadasht
     Wrote a locale independent version of strtol and strtod.  Wrote the
     original loadable filter support however his code has been
     completely rewritten by Christoph Hintermüller and Kevin Atkinson.

Björn Jacke
     Wrote the generic soundslike algorithm which gets all of its data
     from a file, thus eliminating almost all need for language specific
     code from Aspell.

Silicon Graphics Computer Systems, Inc.
Hewlett-Packard Company
     Parts of the SGI STL code were used in various places throughout
     the Aspell source.

In addition the authors of some of translated messages did not release
their work into the Public Domain, and thus own the copyright to the
translated text.  See the files ‘*.po’ in the ‘po’ directory for more
details.

The following people also contributed to the development of Aspell but
do not own the Copyright to part of Aspell.

Sergey Poznyakoff
     Added gettext support.

Chris Martin
     Converted the manual to texinfo.

Lawrence Philips
     Wrote the original metaphone algorithm; however, he released his
     work into the Public Domain.

Michael Kuhn
     Converted the metaphone algorithm into C code and made some
     enhancements to the original algorithm.  He also released his work
     into the Public Domain.

Geoff Kuenning (and contributers)
     The authors of Ispell.  Many of the ideas used in Aspell,
     especially with the affix code, were taken from Ispell.  However
     none of the original Ispell code is used in Aspell.


File: aspell.info,  Node: Copying,  Prev: Authors,  Up: Top

Appendix E Copying
******************

Copyright © 2000–2019 Kevin Atkinson.

Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.1 or
any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts and no Back-Cover Texts.  A
copy of the license is included in the section entitled "GNU Free
Documentation License".

The library and utility program is copyright © 2000–2019 by Kevin
Atkinson.  You can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of
the GNU Lesser General Public License as (LGPL) published by the Free
Software Foundation; either version 2.1 of the License, or (at your
option) any later version.

Certain parts of the library, as indicated at the top of the source
file, are under a weaker license.  However, all parts of the library are
LGPL Compatible.

* Menu:

* GNU Free Documentation License::
* GNU Lesser General Public License::


File: aspell.info,  Node: GNU Free Documentation License,  Next: GNU Lesser General Public License,  Up: Copying

E.1 GNU Free Documentation License
==================================

                      Version 1.2, November 2002

     Copyright © 2000,2001,2002 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
     59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA  02111-1307, USA

     Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies
     of this license document, but changing it is not allowed.

  0. PREAMBLE

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     with or without modifying it, either commercially or
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     being considered responsible for modifications made by others.

     This License is a kind of “copyleft”, which means that derivative
     works of the document must themselves be free in the same sense.
     It complements the GNU General Public License, which is a copyleft
     license designed for free software.

     We have designed this License in order to use it for manuals for
     free software, because free software needs free documentation: a
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  2. VERBATIM COPYING

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  3. COPYING IN QUANTITY

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  5. COMBINING DOCUMENTS

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  6. COLLECTIONS OF DOCUMENTS

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     prevail.

     If a section in the Document is Entitled “Acknowledgements”,
     “Dedications”, or “History”, the requirement (section 4) to
     Preserve its Title (section 1) will typically require changing the
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  9. TERMINATION

     You may not copy, modify, sublicense, or distribute the Document
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     attempt to copy, modify, sublicense or distribute the Document is
     void, and will automatically terminate your rights under this
     License.  However, parties who have received copies, or rights,
     from you under this License will not have their licenses terminated
     so long as such parties remain in full compliance.

  10. FUTURE REVISIONS OF THIS LICENSE

     The Free Software Foundation may publish new, revised versions of
     the GNU Free Documentation License from time to time.  Such new
     versions will be similar in spirit to the present version, but may
     differ in detail to address new problems or concerns.  See
     <http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/>.

     Each version of the License is given a distinguishing version
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     have the option of following the terms and conditions either of
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     published (not as a draft) by the Free Software Foundation.  If the
     Document does not specify a version number of this License, you may
     choose any version ever published (not as a draft) by the Free
     Software Foundation.

E.1.1 ADDENDUM: How to use this License for your documents
----------------------------------------------------------

To use this License in a document you have written, include a copy of
the License in the document and put the following copyright and license
notices just after the title page:

       Copyright (C)  YEAR  YOUR NAME.
       Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
       under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2
       or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation;
       with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover
       Texts.  A copy of the license is included in the section entitled ``GNU
       Free Documentation License''.

If you have Invariant Sections, Front-Cover Texts and Back-Cover Texts,
replace the “with...Texts.” line with this:

         with the Invariant Sections being LIST THEIR TITLES, with
         the Front-Cover Texts being LIST, and with the Back-Cover Texts
         being LIST.

If you have Invariant Sections without Cover Texts, or some other
combination of the three, merge those two alternatives to suit the
situation.

If your document contains nontrivial examples of program code, we
recommend releasing these examples in parallel under your choice of free
software license, such as the GNU General Public License, to permit
their use in free software.


File: aspell.info,  Node: GNU Lesser General Public License,  Prev: GNU Free Documentation License,  Up: Copying

E.2 GNU Lesser General Public License
=====================================

                      Version 2.1, February 1999

     Copyright © 1991, 1999 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
     59 Temple Place – Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307, USA

     Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies
     of this license document, but changing it is not allowed.

     [This is the first released version of the Lesser GPL.  It also counts
     as the successor of the GNU Library Public License, version 2, hence the
     version number 2.1.]

E.2.1 Preamble
--------------

The licenses for most software are designed to take away your freedom to
share and change it.  By contrast, the GNU General Public Licenses are
intended to guarantee your freedom to share and change free software—to
make sure the software is free for all its users.

This license, the Lesser General Public License, applies to some
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Foundation and other authors who decide to use it.  You can use it too,
but we suggest you first think carefully about whether this license or
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When we speak of free software, we are referring to freedom of use, not
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To protect your rights, we need to make restrictions that forbid
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We protect your rights with a two-step method: (1) we copyright the
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Finally, software patents pose a constant threat to the existence of any
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Most GNU software, including some libraries, is covered by the ordinary
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Although the Lesser General Public License is Less protective of the
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The precise terms and conditions for copying, distribution and
modification follow.  Pay close attention to the difference between a
“work based on the library” and a “work that uses the library”.  The
former contains code derived from the library, whereas the latter must
be combined with the library in order to run.

                   GNU LESSER GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE
    TERMS AND CONDITIONS FOR COPYING, DISTRIBUTION AND MODIFICATION

  0. This License Agreement applies to any software library or other
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     Activities other than copying, distribution and modification are
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  1. You may copy and distribute verbatim copies of the Library’s
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  13. The Free Software Foundation may publish revised and/or new
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                              NO WARRANTY

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                      END OF TERMS AND CONDITIONS

E.2.2 How to Apply These Terms to Your New Libraries
----------------------------------------------------

If you develop a new library, and you want it to be of the greatest
possible use to the public, we recommend making it free software that
everyone can redistribute and change.  You can do so by permitting
redistribution under these terms (or, alternatively, under the terms of
the ordinary General Public License).

To apply these terms, attach the following notices to the library.  It
is safest to attach them to the start of each source file to most
effectively convey the exclusion of warranty; and each file should have
at least the “copyright” line and a pointer to where the full notice is
found.

     ONE LINE TO GIVE THE LIBRARY'S NAME AND AN IDEA OF WHAT IT DOES.
     Copyright (C) YEAR  NAME OF AUTHOR

     This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
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     your option) any later version.

     This library is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but
     WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
     MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the GNU
     Lesser General Public License for more details.

     You should have received a copy of the GNU Lesser General Public
     License along with this library; if not, write to the Free Software
     Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307,
     USA.

Also add information on how to contact you by electronic and paper mail.

You should also get your employer (if you work as a programmer) or your
school, if any, to sign a “copyright disclaimer” for the library, if
necessary.  Here is a sample; alter the names:

     Yoyodyne, Inc., hereby disclaims all copyright interest in the library
     `Frob' (a library for tweaking knobs) written by James Random Hacker.

     SIGNATURE OF TY COON, 1 April 1990
     Ty Coon, President of Vice

That’s all there is to it!



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Node: Support7782
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Node: Spellchecking Individual Files8522
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Node: Customizing Aspell20161
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Node: The Options27727
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Node: Dumping Configuration Values47492
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Node: Notes on Various Filters and Filter Modes48591
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Node: Notes on Typo-Analysis49783
Node: Notes on the Different Suggestion Modes51933
Node: Working With Dictionaries55230
Node: Using aspell-import55833
Node: How Aspell Selects an Appropriate Dictionary56674
Node: Listing Available Dictionaries58847
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Node: The Language Data File89139
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Node: Creating An Official Dictionary Package122287
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Node: Installing129587
Node: Generic Install Instructions130730
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