Ispell can support most European languages as well as English. It
even supports British English. But it doesn't come with dictionaries
for those languages (except British), because as an English speaker
I'm not qualified to maintain them. This file contains instructions
on how to install dictionaries for other languages.
The instructions below look long and complicated. Actually, the
process is very simple, but I wanted to be sure to explain everything
in detail and give lots of examples. Once you understand the process,
you should be able to do it in less time than it takes to read this file.
For each language you wish to install, perform the following steps:
1. If necessary, create a new subdirectory of "languages" to hold
your dictionary. Traditionally, the subdirectories are named
after the native word for the language, with accented characters
downgraded to simple ASCII. For example, the French dictionary
would go in "languages/francais", with the c-cedilla lost in
translation.
If you are making a new directory, copy the Makefile from
"languages/nederlands", which is a good prototype, and change
"nederlands" to the name of your language. No other changes
should be necessary unless you have a much more complex setup.
(See the "deutsch" and "american" subdirectories for examples of
how to do fancier things).
2. Find a word list for the language. Usually, the best way to find
a list is either to look in languages/Where, or to ask around in
your local country. Check to see if the word list comes with an
affix file (*.aff). If it does, you're often better off using
that affix file, even if one came with ispell. The files should
go in the directory you created in step 1.
Many word lists available on the Internet are already "munched"
for use with ispell. A "munched" list can be identified by
looking for slash ("/") characters at the ends of words, such as
those found in the English dictionary "languages/english/english.0".
If your list isn't munched, you will probably want to munch it
before you complete installation. See step 5 below for
instructions.
For example, if you are installing Dutch (Nederlands) support, you
need to have a file named "nederlands.aff" and a word list. The
Makefile assumes that the word list is named "nederlands.sml", but
you can change this. Put both files in "languages/nederlands".
3. Depending on the language, you may have to add certain definitions
to your local.h file. Remove the definition of NO8BIT, so that
you will be able to support ISO Latin-1 characters. If your affix
file uses both upper- and lower-case flag characters, add a line
reading "#define MASKBITS 64" (or 128 or 256).
4. Now comes the hard part. You must add a language definition to
the LANGUAGES variable. If necessary, refer to the file
"config.X" for the complete syntax of this variable. The default
value is:
#define LANGUAGES "{american,MASTERDICTS=american.med+,HASHFILES=americanmed+.hash,EXTRADICT=/usr/dict/words}"
which builds only the American dictionary. You must extend this
so that it builds your favorite language(s) as well.
WARNING WARNING WARNING: The LANGUAGES variable *must* be written
as a single line. You cannot use backslash-newline or any other
method to continue it. It's going to look ugly in your local.h
file, but there's no way around it.
In the simplest case, you can just add your language in curly
braces. For example, if you are building a Swedish dictionary
from a word list named "svenska.sml" and an affix file named
"svenska.aff", just change LANGUAGES to read:
#define LANGUAGES "{american,MASTERDICTS=american.med+,HASHFILES=americanmed+.hash,EXTRADICT=/usr/dict/words} {svenska}"
In more complex cases, you might need to override certain Makefile
variables. For example, if you also wanted to build a Norwegian
dictionary from a word list named "words.norwegian" and an affix
file named "norsk8.aff", you would extend the above definition as
follows:
#define LANGUAGES "{american,MASTERDICTS=american.med+,HASHFILES=americanmed+.hash,EXTRADICT=/usr/dict/words} {svenska} {norsk,DICTIONARY=words.norwegian,AFFIXES=norsk8.aff}"
Incidentally, from ispell's point of view, British and American
English are just two other languages. If you want a British
dictionary as well as an American one, just add a "british" entry
to LANGUAGES that parallels the "american" one.
Finally, if you wanted to build your own language without the
English dictionaries, you could omit the American part. For
example, a Danish installation might choose:
#define LANGUAGES "{dansk}"
In this case, you will also want to add:
#define MASTERHASH "dansk.hash"
so that final installation will proceed correctly.
5. If your word list has already been "munched", you can skip this
step. Otherwise, you should munch it before proceeding. Start by
typing "make munchable" in the master ispell directory. Then cd
into the directory for your language, and run munchlist with
stdout directed into a temporary file. You *must* remember to set
TMPDIR to the name of a directory with lots of free space, or
munchlist will fail. This step takes a long time, so take a lunch
break here.
Some languages have their affix files distributed as "xxx.7bit"
rather than "xxx.aff". You can either use the ".7bit" version
directly, or use "make xxx.aff" to create the corresponding ".aff"
file.
For example, a German installation with the dictionary stored in
"deutsch.sml" would run munchlist as follows (assuming C-shell
syntax and assuming the /var/tmp has several tens of megabytes of
