[Aspell-user] aspell and CocoAspell on OSX

[Clytie Siddall]

Hello everyone :)

I'm using aspell to spellcheck Vietnamese on Mac OSX 10.4.7 (Intel- 
based Mac). Spellchecking Vietnamese is of very limited use, since  
ours is a monosyllabic language largely based on accented vowels,  
resulting in very few combinations of characters which are not valid  
words, but spellchecking does catch the wilder typos, so it is still  
worth doing, many of my typos being of the wilder variety. ;)

My problems here arise because I need to be able to use aspell both  
from the OSX GUI, and from the command-line.

CocoAspell [1] makes it possible for OSX users to call aspell from  
the GUI built-in spelling services. That's very useful, so I don't  
want to break it. CocoAspell (as far as I can tell) allows the user  
to configure the main aspell options via a Preference Pane (resulting  
in an XML property list used by the system). I have these set to my  
satisfaction (although I would like to learn how to handle the  
Context section), but I notice that they do not affect command-line  
aspell.

This becomes important because I also want to be able to use a  
translation tool called pofilter, part of the Translate Toolkit from  
the Wordforge project [2]. This filter uses aspell to spellcheck  
gettext PO files, used by free-software translators, and otherwise  
very difficult to spellcheck, because of the proportion of spellcheck- 
distracting material, including the fact that more than half the file  
is in another language. For example, a single PO element (one of  
some, many or thousands in a PO file) has headers (in English), the  
original string (in English), the sub-element names (in English), in  
fact, the only part of the element which is in the spell-checked  
language is the translation string. Not easy to spellcheck.

When I try to use aspell with pofilter (a command-line tool), I find  
that the aspell settings from the command-line appear to be  
independent of the ones created by CocoAspell. The version of aspell  
used is different, and the preferences I have set for CocoAspell (my  
dictionary, my filters) have not been set for command-line aspell.  
The aspell.conf file doesn't show any of my settings.

I am hesitant to mess with something that does work in one place (the  
GUI). I did try editing aspell.conf, based on what I could work out  
from the manpage, but all I did was break CocoAspell, so I had to  
delete everything and reinstall. Not helpful. :(

Does anyone here use both CocoAspell and aspell from the command- 
line? Can anyone advise me on my situation? I have written to  
CocoAspell's developer, but he has not responded on this. No doubt it  
is difficult for him to advise individual users.

All I need to be able to do with command-line aspell, is tell it to  
use my Vietnamese dictionary (currently sitting in "/Library/ 
Application\ Support/CocoAspell/"). I want it to use the filters URL,  
HTML, email and SGML (I wish it would handle XML/DocBook and PO). I  
want to sort out the confusing situation where CocoAspell has  
installed aspell-0.60, while "aspell --version" returns "@(#)  
International Ispell Version 3.1.20 (but really Aspell 0.50.5)",  
which is significantly older.

All in all, I'm considerably puzzled, and would very much appreciate  
some advice. Thankyou. :)

from Clytie (vi-VN, Vietnamese free-software translation team / nhóm  
Việt hóa phần mềm tự do)
http://groups-beta.google.com/group/vi-VN

[1] http://people.ict.usc.edu/~leuski/cocoaspell/home.html

[2] http://www.wordforge.org/drupal/