[aspell-user] Status of run-together support

[Toralf Lund]

OK, I just started using aspell, and looking into what it can do. So far, 
the feature that interests me the most is what you term "run-together 
words".

The thing is, all spell checker software I've tried leaves a lot to be 
desired in the area of compounds. Allowing multiple words to be written as 
one is quite common, but in some languages, like German and Norwegian, 
compound words not only *can* be run-together, but they also *should* be. 
One of the most common mistakes in modern usage is to split up words that 
should be written together, and I attribute this partly to the fact that 
no spell checker will detect it. It would be *really* great if Aspell 
could.

In other languages, such as English, you usually write the words 
separately when making up a compound, but some "standard" ones are written 
as one word, or with hyphens between the components, and splitting these 
up is still wrong. Of course, detecting that is really a lot simpler as 
you can include the compounds (which would be impractical e.g. for 
Norwegian as there are just too many of them) in the wordlist, but it does 
require smarter handling of whitespace characters.

Comments, anyone?

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Toralf Lund <address@hidden>  +47 66 85 51 22
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