Re: Adding ispell-multi.el and friends to Emacs

[Agustin Martin]

On Wed, Jun 20, 2007 at 02:46:03PM +0200, martin rudalics wrote:
> >>FWIW, I have misalignment clashes only when Emacs and the spell system
> >>disagree about the coding system.  In that case, however, the output
> >>of the spell system is unusable for single words too.
> >
> >
> > Unless communication is done in utf8, if you have an utf8 buffer with a 
> char
> > not in the dict charset ispell-region will fail with a misalingment (at
> > least with ispell, most aspell communications are done in utf8), but if 
> you
> > try ispell-word in that word, the foreign char will not be recognized as
> > part of a word and only part of it will be sent to ispell for testing. The
> > difference is that ispell-region will fail for all the region if a
> > misalignment appear while ispell-word will only do things differently for
> > the affected word. That was the intention.
> 
> Personally, I don't care whether a word, line, region or buffer appears
> corrupted.  I'd discontinue spell-checking in any of these cases. 

Sometimes you know what happened and can continue.

> The interface (ispell.el) has to check which coding system should get
> applied.

Agreed, and the interface should avoid sending words with non supported
chars in case a word with them is present (as with a foreign word) or at
least discriminate properly. What I mean is that is difficult to do that
when a line is sent as a whole to the ispell process. When things are
done word-by-word that is possible, but this is of small efficiency in
large buffers.

> The user has to check whether the interface got it right and,
> if necessary, be able to override wrong settings.  BTW, I don't use utf8
> to communicate with Aspell and did not encounter any problems so far.

You probably use it implicitely unless you use an explicitely user defined
non-utf8 dict entry.

>From ispell.el,

(defun ispell-aspell-find-dictionary (dict-name)
...
(list "-d" dict-name "--encoding=utf-8")
...
'utf-8))

BTW, I have just reproduced it with emacs21, aspell and the old ispell.el.
I admit that this is currently (emacs 22) a problem only with ispell or with
buggy user-defined entries.

Anyway, this subthread started when Peter considered using the word-by-word
mechanism and I pointed out that it might not be efficient in large buffers.
I do not think this is now adding much to that.

-- 
Agustin