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ISPELL.MAN
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1991-05-24
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ISPELL - Correct spelling for a file
SYNOPSIS
ispell [ -x | -d file | -p file | -w chars ] file .....
ispell [ -d file | -p file | -w chars ] -l
ispell [ -d file | -p file ] -a
DESCRIPTION
Ispell is fashioned after the spell program from ITS (called ispell
on Twenex systems.) The most common usage is "ispell filename". In
this case, ispell will display each word which does not appear in the
dictionary, and allow you to change it. If there are "near misses"
in the dictionary (words which differ by only a single letter, a
missing or extra letter, or a pair of transposed letters), then they
are also displayed. If you think the word is correct as it stands,
you can type either "Space" to accept it this one time, or "I" to
accept it and put it in your private dictionary. If one of the near
misses is the word you want, type the corresponding number. Finally,
if none of these choices is right, you can type "R" and you will be
prompted for a replacement word.
When a misspelled word is found, it is printed at the top of the screen.
Any near misses will be printed on the following lines, and finally, two
lines containing the word are printed at the bottom of the screen. If
your terminal can type in reverse video, the word itself is highlighted.
The -l or "list" option to ispell is used to produce a list of misspelled
words from the standard input.
The -a is intended to be used from other programs through a pipe. In
this mode, ispell expects the standard input to consist of single words.
Each word is read, and a single line is written to the standard output.
If the word was found in the main dictionary, or your personal dictionary,
then the line contains only a '*'. If the word was found through suffix
removal, then the line contains a '+', a space, and the root word. If
the word is not in the dictionary, but there are near misses, then the
line contains an '&', a space, and a list of the near misses separated by
spaces. Also, each near miss is capitalized the same as the input words.
Finally, if the word neither appears in the dictionary, and there are no
near misses, then the line contains only a '#'. This mode is also
suitable for interactive use when you want to figure out the spelling of
a single word. (These characters are the same as the codes that the real
spell program uses.)
The -x option causes ispell to remove the .bak file that it normally
leaves. The .bak file contains the pre-corrected text. If there are
file opening / writing errors, the .bak file may be left for recovery
purposes even with the -x option.
The -d option is used to specify an alternate hashed dictionary file,
other than the default. If the filename does not begin with a "/",
the library directory for the default dictionary file is prefixed.
This is useful to allow dictionaries which prefer alternate british
spellings ("centre", "tyre", etc), or add lists of special-purpose
jargon and acronyms for subclasses of documents. There are some
shortcomings in attempting to provide foreign-language dictionaries,
but something like "-dfrench" could be made to work somewhat.
The -p option is used to specify an alternate personal dictionary file.
If the file name does not begin with "/", $HOME is prefixed. Also, the
shell variable WORDLIST may be set, which renames the personal dictionary
in the same manner. The command line overrides WORDLIST setting. If
neither is present "ispell.wrd" is used.
The -w option may be used to specify characters other than alphabetics
which may also appear in words. For instance, -w "&" will allow "AT&T"
to be picked up. Underscores are useful in many technical documents.
There is an admittedly crude provision in this option for 8-bit
international characters. If "n" appears in the character string, the
three characters following are a DECIMAL code 0 - 255, for the character.
There must be three decimal characters in all cases, so you have to prepend
with 0's, for instance, to include bells and formfeeds in your words (an
admittedly silly thing to do, but aren't most pedagogical examples):
n007n012
Numeric digits other than the three following "n" are simply numeric
characters. Use of "n" does not conflict with anything because actual
alphabetics have no meaning - alphabetics are already accepted.
Ispell will typically be used with input from a file, meaning that
preserving parity for possible 8 bit characters from the input text is
OK. If you specify the -l option, and actually type text from the
terminal, this may create problems if your stty settings preserve parity.
It is possible to install ispell in such a way as to only support ASCII
range text if desired.
DEFAULT FILES
ispell.hsh
ispell.wrd
BUGS
Perhaps more than ten choices should be allowed for near misses.
The hash table is stored as a quarter-megabyte array, so a PDP-11
version does not seem likely.
Ispell should understand more troff syntax, and deal more
intelligently with contractions.
While alternate dictionaries for foreign languages could be defined,
and the international characters included in words, rules concerning
word endings / pluralization accommodate english only.
AUTHOR
Pace Willisson (pace@mit-vax)
Paul Coppinger (602/967-2563) (OS/2 & MSDOS port)