Nov-02-2006


Aspell is another spelling checker from GNU, and can be a
replacement for ispell.  It currently supports checking text
data (certain languages) in UTF-8 encoding, whereas ispell does not.

First you need to install the FreeBSD package "aspell" appropriate
to your OS version -- please note: older aspell did not provide
ispell compatible options, nor support for non-English languages.
If you're still using FreeBSD 3.x or 4.x, you probably want to
stick with ispell, and skip the rest of this file.

Aspell dictionaries:

The aspell dictionaries are located in /usr/local/share/aspell
directory.  The default used by aspell (US English version)
should be "en_US" (the file "en_US.multi").  If you want to use
a different one, e.g. "en_US-w_accents", you need to set that in
a file called /usr/local/etc/aspell.conf.  Use your text editor
to edit or create that file, and ensure it has a line to set
the default dictionary, e.g.:

	master en_US-w_accents

Note that you only give the base name of the dictionary file,
without any ".alias", ".multi" or whatever extensions that are
part of the actual dictionary file names.  You can type in the
command "aspell dump dicts" to see what dictionaries your aspell
has.

After you exit out of text editor, you can verify your choice
by issuing the command:

	aspell config master

and it should respond with your choice of master dictionary.
You can now prepare a text file, perhaps with deliberate spelling
errors, and check it:

	aspell check file_to_check


To tell M2K to use aspell, please do the following:

1. In directory /usr/bin/amgraf/tkscripts, edit the file "prefs" to have:

	set m2kPrefs(spell_proc) "aspell"

   (note the default is an empty string).

   For aspell, the value of m2kPrefs(ispell_dictdir) is not used.

2. If you will use multi-language dictionaries, edit the file
   /usr/mecca/menus/idict.menu, and list your choices of aspell
   dictionaries there.  The file "idict.menu" may not exist, if so
   you need to create it.  Please see the file
   "/usr/mecca/menus/idict.menu.sample" for information.

   If you have been using ispell with multiple dictionaries, please
   also see /usr/mecca/menus/idict.menu.sample for aspell notes.