[Aspell-user] Bad ispell.el <-> aspell-0.60 interactions in utf8 environments

[Agustin Martin]

(Please, cc me replies, I am not subscribed to aspell-user)

Hi,

We have received a problem report at Debian that, after some debugging seems
to have appeared after aspell 0.60 started having utf8 support.

http://bugs.debian.org/299725

When run in an UTF8 environment, aspell 0.60 expects utf8 text and returns
utf8 text, so if latin1 text is piped to it, some problems appear. While
this might sound crazy when done from the command line, that seems to be
what happens when ispell.el pipes to aspell a text as latin1 (because the
corresponding entry says the dict is latin1), but aspell is run in an utf8
environment, e.g., piping the word rôle (as is, in latin1 encoding) to
aspell (as aspell -a -d british-w_accents) in a latin1 environment gives

@(#) International Ispell Version 3.1.20 (but really Aspell 0.60.3-20050121)
& rôle 35 0: role, Roley, rile, Rolfe, roles, tole, roe, Ole, olé, roll,
rule, prole, Rolf, roué, Cole, Dole, Pole, Rome, Rose, Rowe, Roze, bole,
dole, hole, mole, pole, robe, rode, rope, rose, rote, rove, sole, vole,
role's

while doing that in an utf8 environment (but the word in latin1) will
return

@(#) International Ispell Version 3.1.20 (but really Aspell 0.60.3-20050121)
*
& le 73 2: Le, Lea, Lee, Leo, Lew, Lie, lea, lee, lei, lie, El, L, l, LED,
Lek, Lem, Len, Les, Lev, Lr, led, leg, let, lye, E, e, LA, LL, La, Li, Lu,
Ly, la, ll, lo, Ole, ale, olé, LC, LP, Ln, Lt, lb, lg, ls, Be, Ce, DE, De,
Fe, GE, Ge, He, IE, ME, Me, NE, Ne, OE, PE, Re, SE, Se, Te, Xe, be, he, me,
re, we, ye, Le's, L's

This last seems what emacs do trough ispell.el, resulting in a 'Ispell and
its process have different charsets' error on ispell-word

The fix I am considering is to modify ispell.el so

--encoding=ispell_dict_encoding

is added to the aspell call (and only to the aspell call). Code for that
is simple, and seems to work well, but I wonder if a better fix is proposed.
(I already looked at J.J. Ramsey's patch, that should take care of this if
the user selects automatic reencodings, although not otherwise, but I
prefer something simpler)

Cheers,

-- 
Agustin