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Next: 5. Customizing Aspell Up: Aspell .33.7.1 alpha A Previous: 3. Basic
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Subsections

  * 4.1 Creating an Individual Word List
      + 4.1.1 Format of the Replacement Word List
  * 4.2 The PWLI file
  * 4.3 Dumping the contents of the word list

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4. Managing Word Lists

4.1 Creating an Individual Word List

To create an individual main word list from a list of words use the
command

    aspell --lang=«lang» create master ./«base» < «wordlist»

where «base» is the name of the word list and «word list» is the list of
words separated by white space. The name of the word list will
automatically be converted to all lowercase. The "./" is important
because without it aspell will create the word list in the normal word
list directory. If you are trying to create a word list in a language
other than english check the aspell data-dir (usually /usr/share/aspell,
use "aspell dump config" to find out what it is on your system) to see
if a language data file exists for your language. If not you will need to
create one. See chapter 7 for more information on using Aspell with other
languages.

This will create the file «base» in the current directory. To use the new
word list copy the file to the normal word list directory (use "aspell
config" to find out what it is) and use the option --master=«base».

The compiled dictionary file is machine dependent. It is dependent on
endian order, and the page size for the machine because they are mmaped
in. Please do not distribute the compiled dictionaries unless you are only
distributing them for a particular platform such as you would a binary.
That is why is normally installed in "lib/aspell" instead of "share/
aspell".

Aspell is now also able to use special "multi" dictionaries. See section
5.4.1 form more information.

A personal and replacement word list can be created in a similar fashion.

Because Aspell does not support any sort of affix compression like Ispell
does Ispell word lists will not work as is. In order to use Ispell's word
lists simply pipe the word list through "ispell -e" to expand the
munched word lists.

4.1.1 Format of the Replacement Word List

The replacement word has each replacement pair on its own line in the
following format

    «misspelled word»: «correction»
   
4.2 The PWLI file

In order for Aspell to be able to correctly recognize a dictionary based
on the setting of the LANG environmental variable and for Pspell to be
able to find your word lists each main word list installed should have at
least one PWLI file associated with it in the Pspell data directory. This
is normally /usr/local/share/pspell/. You can use "pspell-config
pkgdatadir" to find out what it is on your system.

Each PWLI has the the following name:

    «language»[-[«spelling»][-«jargon»]]-«module».pwli

Where «language» is the two letter language code, «spelling» is the
particular spelling your interested in if the languages has multiple
spelling in different parts of the world such as English, «jargon» is any
extra informations to distinguish the word list from other ones with the
same language and spelling, and «module» is the pspell module the main
word list is for.

For example:

    en-aspell.pwli
    en-american-aspell.pwli
    en-american-medical-ispell.pwli
    en-american-xlg-ispell.pwli
    de--medical-ispell.pwli

Notice how if the spelling is left out but the jargon is not there needs
to be two dashes between the language and the jargon.

Each PWLI file for an Aspell word list should then contain exactly one
line which contains the full path of the main word list.

4.3 Dumping the contents of the word list

The dump command will simply dump the contents of a word list to stdout in
a format than can be read back in with aspell create.

If no word list is specified the command will act on the default one. For
example the command

    aspell dump personal

will simply dump the contents of the current personal word list to stdout.

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next up previous contents
Next: 5. Customizing Aspell Up: Aspell .33.7.1 alpha A Previous: 3. Basic
Usage   Contents
Kevin Atkinson 2001-08-19
