[aspell-user] Re: Problem with aspell

[Kevin Atkinson]

> I am trying to move from ispell to aspell; I and my users, we have a lot
> of TeX files written in Italian.  Installing the latest release of ispell,
> aspell and aspell-it from the RedHat 7.2 rpm's (i.e. aspell .33) has the
> following problem: in our files, accented letters are written in the TeX
> way, i.e. \`a, \`e, \'e and so on; while in the Italian dictionary shipped
> with aspell-it they are written in the usual iso-8859-1 way (?, ?, ?, ...;
> I hope you may see these glyphs).
>
> As a result, accented letters are not recognized in a word.  ispell has no
> problems with that; and I could not figure after having carefully browsed
> the aspell manuals how to tell to aspell to accept these TeX escapes.  I
> have also tried to dump the master italian dictionary, to susbtitute TeX
> sequences and to rebuild the master dictionary; but aspell refuses to
> handle \ inside a word.

Unfortunately Aspell does not currently support TeX style accented
characters.  You best bet is to run some sort of script to convert then
into the iso-8859-1 way.  TeX can handle the iso-8859-1 characters
just after giving a few commands in your document (I don't quite remember
what they were)

If that is not possible you can workaround the problem by making the
charters used to specify accents special characters.  See section 7.1 of
the manual for more info.  If you do this you will have to recreate the
dictionary with all the accents written the TeX way.