[Aspell-user] personal wordlists: location of added words

[Alan G Isaac]

I finally decided to try aspell (0.50.3).
(I'm on Windows.)  Incredible program!

But as a new user, and a reasonably patient
and documentation oriented one, I feel I should
share my difficulty in determining where words
are "added".  This is probably clear somewhere in the
documentation, but I did not find it.

What I want from the docs is a statement like:
"When you choose to 'add' a word, it is placed
in a personal word list.  The default location
of the personal word list is ..."
In fact, I am not even sure such a list was created,
for the command 
aspell dump personal
caused aspell to say it could not
open %USERPROFILE%/en.per (which indeed does not
exist).

So I still do not know the answer to that "..."
It seems there should have been a new file with a .pws
extension (or perhaps .per) somewhere on my computer,
but I found none.

After a bit of web search I found the following
suggestion:
    http://mail.gnu.org/archive/html/aspell-user/2001-06/msg00006.html
    You can also create a new personal word list
    my simply adding the header line "personal_ws-1.1 english 0"
    to a top of a word list.  The format of the header line is
      personal_ws-1.1 <lang> <count>

    http://mail.gnu.org/archive/html/aspell-user/2001-06/msg00005.html
      aspell --add-extra-dicts=~/.aspell.english.pws --personal=./<per-doc-dict>

After I figured out that should be 'en' rather than
'english', this works great, and now I know where I am
"adding" words.  Knowing this is, I would say, one of the
first things a new user wants.  Words, after all, can be
added by mistake, and a simple mechanism to fix that is
needed.  I therefore suggest some PROMINENT statement in the
docs addressing this issue.

Thanks for a great program,
Alan Isaac