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

[David O'Brien]

On 12/20/2016 06:56 AM, address@hidden wrote:
>>>>>> "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
> 
> 
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> 

Thanks for the detailed reply. It helps to explain what might be going on.

I'll investigate manually adding entries a bit further and see what I
come up with.

cheers
-- 

David

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