[Pan-users] Re: Questions about the next release

[Duncan]

Bob Henson posted on Fri, 12 Nov 2010 19:17:25 +0000 as excerpted:

> On Fri, 12 Nov 2010 17:29:02 +0000, Steve Davies wrote:
> 
>>> [spell-checking on MS servant-ware platforms]
> 
>> The existing Windows installer version is meant to have aspell support
>> compiled in - Sadly I can find no instructions on what to do next.

> I downloaded the installers for Pan 0.133 and for Aspell and the English
> dictionaries, and tried every combination of instalment position I could
> think of for Aspell, but to no avail (see my long conversation with
> Sinner in alt.os.linux.mint). I installed them in the standard place in
> Windows 7, in c:\aspell, added Aspell to the windows Path, as
> subdirectories of Pan, actually in the Pan directory with aspell.dll,
> but no joy. Aspell actually worked form the command line, but I couldn't
> get Pan to call it.
> 
> The only clue I can give you was spotted by Sinner - any attempt to
> write a message with spell checking selected immediately produced an
> error message in the log saying that Pan could not find the en_US word
> file - which might indicate it's coded to only look for that one
> dictionary.

Caveat:  I can't/won't agree to take legal damages responsibility for 
software that's already deliberately black-box, thus disrespecting my 
rights as a thinking human being to either examine or have the code 
examined for problems before making such a legal commitment.  That's a 
failure of the basic legal concept of a fair meeting of the minds required 
to make a valid legal agreement.  Given their demonstrated disrespect of 
my basic human/legal rights in that regard, I have reason to suspect their 
ethics, thus meaning it's even more likely to be malware, giving me even 
less reason to want to agree to such a thing.  As such, there's legal 
issues with running such software on my computers even if I'd otherwise 
want to (but who in their right mind but mindless lusers too eager to see 
the pr0n or whatever to think about the consequences (thus arguably /not/ 
in their right mind) willingly runs suspected malware without examining it 
in any case, so I don't want to), and I thus don't/won't/can't-legally 
install and run on my computers such software, including MS Windows, Apple 
OSX, Adobe Flash, nVidia servantware Linux video drivers, etc.  So my 
personal knowledge/experience in that area (what hasn't been forgotten 
yet) is outdated by roughly a decade now, certainly predating any detailed 
understanding of pan's functionality.

That said...

If pan's log says it can't find the dictionary, it's apparently loading 
aspell itself or it wouldn't get to the point of complaining about a 
missing dictionary.

Meanwhile, en_US is I believe the default dictionary for historical/POSIX 
reasons.  On Linux at least, that's changed by setting the appropriate 
variable (LANG, IIRC) in the environment that pan inherits at startup.  
(Here, LANG="en_US.UTF-8".  As I only read English anyway, however, and 
the default/ POSIX locale config suits me just fine in general, I don't 
have the detail of knowledge or experience in that area that those for 
whom English is an adopted language are likely to have.)

Do note however that there's a patch floating around that makes pan's 
spell-check dictionary a run-time choice, tho the GUI for doing so wasn't 
particularly polished, last time I checked, simply providing a text-box in 
which the user can fill in the appropriate setting, which the user must 
then already know, since it's not a drop-down listing available settings.

Meanwhile, pan's spelling related direct dependency here is gtkspell, 
which in turn depends on enchant, which in turn has options (on Gentoo, at 
least, where the options show up as USE flags) for three different spell-
checking backends, aspell, hunspell and zemberek (which is described as a 
Turkish spell-checker, no /wonder/ I had no clue!).

The one I have enabled here is hunspell (described as an improved 
replacement for myspHoweverell in OOo, OpenOffice.org), which is 
apparently gradually replacing aspell, and uses myspell dictionaries.  
Firefox uses hunspell directly for spellchecking (instead of going thru 
enchant, thus allowing the choice of spellcheck backends), and if 
hunspell's already installed for either OOo or firefox, it might as well 
be the enchant backend as well, rather than having both aspell and hunspell 
on the system.

So I can't verify the default aspell dictionaries location, since I use 
the hunspell backend instead.  But the system-wide myspell dictionaries 
are stored in /usr/share/myspell/ on Gentoo, and thus likely on most LSB/
FHS based *ix systems. (Gentoo isn't /too/ strict about LSB since many of 
its features assume a binary distribution and thus don't fit well in a 
scripted-package-build-from-source distribution like Gentoo, but it tries 
to abide by the File Hierarchy Standard bit of it unless there's specific 
reason to do otherwise, since that makes both package maintenance and 
sysadmining easier.)  For the same FHS reason, system-wide aspell dicts 
are likely to be found in a corresponding /usr/share/aspell/ location.

Of course I have little idea where the corresponding location might be on 
the servantware platform in question...  But whoever's compiling gtkspell 
and/or enchant for it might wish to consider switching to hunspell, since 
that could well enable firefox, openoffice.org/libreoffice, and pan all 
three, for those who have them installed at least, to share the same 
spellcheck backend and dictionaries.  Of course that assumes hunspell's 
available and what's actually used on that servantware platform for both 
firefox and OOo/libreoffice, a reasonable but at this point unverified 
assumption.

As for the user-specific custom dicts, I still have my aspell custom dicts 
located in ~/.aspell.en.prepl and ~/.aspell.en.pws.  Meanwhile, the newer 
enchant based location seems to be ~/.config/enchant/ (.config or config, 
I have the former as a symlink to the latter since I don't like hidden 
files/dirs), with firefox I'd guess keeping its own separate ones in each 
profile (unchecked, and I don't use OOo/libreoffice so have no clue what 
it does).

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman