Re: [Aspell-user] Help adding word to dictionary?

[traverso]

>>>>> "David" == David O'Brien <address@hidden> writes:

    David> Can anyone help me understand what's happening here?

    David> aspell version: aspell-en-2015.04.24-2.fc24.x86_64
    David> aspell-0.60.6.1-13.fc24.x86_64

    David> I use the following to do spelling checks:

    David> find . -name reports\*.xml -exec aspell -c --mode=sgml '{}'
    David> \;

    David> Most of the time it seems to work fine, but right now I'm
    David> trying to add "drop-down" to my personal dictionary, and
    David> for some reason it fails. The spelling checker finds
    David> "dropdown" and offers a list of options, including
    David> "drop-down". I choose the option for this, and then it
    David> highlights "drop-down" and offers a list of options. I
    David> choose the option to add it to my dictionary, and
    David> continue. The next time it finds "dropdown" I have to
    David> repeat the whole process. It's as if it never gets added.

    David> I even manually added the entry to my personal dictionary,
    David> but that didn't help. I've added other words
    David> successfully. Is it because it's a hyphenated word?
    David> Something else that I'm missing?

My understanding is that the aspell English dictionary does not
consider the dash as a word component, hence drop-down is a compositum
of drop and down: two words, both accepted, hence drop-down is a
suggestion. Suggesting (or adding manually) drop-down adds "drop" and
"down" to the dictionary (but they are already there...).

This does not happen for French. The difference is that en.dat contains

    special ' -*- 

(that says that an apostrophe is allowed in the middle of a word)
while fr.dat contains 

    special ' -*- . -*- - -*- 

(meaning that apostrophe, period and hyphen in the middle of a word
are allowed). Hence "belle-mère" is one valid word (not two words)
(and means mother-in-law, not "nice mother")

Other languages, e.g. German and Latin have no "special" at all: only
letters are allowed as word elements.

These differences are justified by the grammatical (and statistical)
structure of the languages.

AFAIK changing the "special" line and recompiling is not a solution,
since (valid) words composed of two valid words joined by a hyphen
should then be added (manually) to the dictionary.

Carlo