bug#19229: ispell on Windows

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Wed, 20 May 2015 19:53:22 +0100
> From: Alan Third <alan@idiocy.org>
> 
> Ultimately it's the LANG environment variable, or in the case of
> Windows the lack of it. I found that with LANG set to "en_GB" I didn't
> need any other configuration to get hunspell working. I didn't even
> need to tell emacs to use hunspell.

I advise against that "solution", because this value of LANG might
confuse other Windows programs if they are invoked by Emacs, and even
Emacs itself, where its features depend on the locale.  Windows short
names of locales are different from Posix names; in particular they
have 3 letters instead of 2.  Most native Windows programs will not
understand the value such as "en_GB".

Instead, I suggest to copy en_GB.* dictionary files that Hunspell uses
to corresponding ENG.* files.

Alternatively, say something like this in your ~/.emacs:

  (ispell-change-dictionary "en_GB" t)

which re-invokes Hunspell with the en_GB dictionary without messing
with your LANG variable.

> It appears the new version of ispell in 24.4+ is very heavily
> dependent on LANG to the extent that explicitly setting
> ispell-dictionary won't over-ride it.

The value of LANG specifies the default dictionary to load, but that's
all.