Re: [Aspell-user] German words

[Agustin Martin]

On Sat, Apr 23, 2005 at 11:40:56AM +0200, Mahdi Osman wrote:
> Hi, list,
> 
> I am using aspell under xemacs 21.4.13.
> 
> Aspell does not recognize German words with ä, ü etc. I tried all german
> dictionaries (Deutsch, Deutsch8). Deutsch8 does not check anything at
> all. Deutsch checks spelling but fails to handle ä, ü etc. What can I do
> to overcome this problem?
> 

I can imagine two possible reasons for that,

a) You are in a iso-8859-15 environment

   Even if looking at the chartables iso-8859-1 and iso-8859-15 look very
   similar they are not equivalent, for {x}emacs they are different
   charsets, and unification is not yet complete. That means that the same
   character can be internally handled differently depending on the charset.

   If this is your case, you should have the same problem with ispell.

b) You are in a utf-8 environment

   aspell-0.60 tries to do the communication with emacs in an encoding taken
   from the environment. If this is utf-8 it will try utf8, but ispell.el
   will expect iso-8859-1 for german8, so the casechars/non--casechars will
   not work. This problem does not appear for previous aspell versions.

   If this is your case, this should not happen with ispell.

Upstream is aware of both problems, but seems to be very busy lately.

if (a) trying to set the language environment to iso-8859-1 might help, but
I am not sure how that is done for xemacs. Of course setting something like
LANG (or the appropriate variable) to an iso-8859-1 variant might also help.

if (b) a temporary fix could be to set LC_CHARSET to C (I do not have the
reference here, Kevin please confirm if that is the right variable) when
calling xemacs.

Any real fix implies modifying ispell.el

Hope this helps,
 
-- 
Agustin