Re: [Aspell-user] Special characters in a custom dictionary will break the spell check.

[Kevin Atkinson]

On Fri, 6 Jul 2012, Stanislas Rolland wrote:

> I am encountering this same problem: trying to add a word that contains a 
> special character into a personal dictionary gives an error like:
>
> @(#) International Ispell Version 3.1.20 (but really Aspell 0.60.3)
> Error: The word "erf?rt" is invalid. The character '?' (U+3F) may not appear 
> in the middle of a word.
>
> The word is utf-8-encoded into a file that is piped to the Aspell command. 
> The command includes the --encoding='utf-8' option. The personal dictionary 
> file also specifies utf-8 as encoding, and if I add the word manually to this 
> dictionary, it is correctly taken into account when spell checking is done.
>
> Apparently, Aspell ignores the option specifying the encoding of the input, 
> and assumes that it is encoded  in the same character set as the main 
> dictionary.

I don't think that is the issue.  The issue is that the Aspell is 8-bit 
internally and the personal dictionary needs to get mapped to the same 
character set that the main dictionary uses.  The '?' means that the 
Unicode character was not available in the main dictionary character set 
and it thus defaulted to a '?'.

That being said, there is a way get to nearly any Latin letter accepted 
with most dictionaries.  It involved changing the dictionary charset to a 
special "universal" one, for example iso-8859-1 will become iso-8859-1-u. 
The dictionary data file will need to change and the charset files may 
need to be installed (you can get them from the aspell-lang package).

I have posted about this before:
  http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/aspell-user/2009-01/msg00005.html
There I describe reinstalling the dictionary from source.  You should also 
be able to hack the current installed version without having to recompile 
anything as the *-u are backwards compatible with the vanilla versions.

-Kevin
Aspell Author