[Pan-users] pan, gtkspell, and specifying your language

[Evan Martin]

Hello all,
I am the author GtkSpell.  GtkSpell 2 isn't very popular (I just wrote 
it recently!) so I figure the Pan users are the people I should ask 
about features.  :)

I'm working on GtkSpell 2.0.1 which should drop-in in place of GtkSpell 
2.0.0.  (I plan to eventually make a GtkSpell 2.1 which will break 
backward compatibility but work a bit more cleanly, but that will happen 
 sometime in the future.)

I've had a few requests for supporting alternate languages (such as this 
one: 
http://mail.freesoftware.fsf.org/pipermail/pan-users/2002-July/001284.html 
 ) and I was wondering how foreign-language users actually specify 
their language.

Do you normally set an environment variable?  Which one (LANG, LC_ALL)?
If that variable is set to a language other than English, would it make 
 sense for GtkSpell to default to a language other than English, or do 
we need the applications (Pan, LogJam) to allow you to specify the 
language you're writing in?
(I can imagine wanting to write different messages in different 
languages... but for now, what should GtkSpell default to: English? 
Your locale-provided language?)


As for some other concerns I've seen here:  Yes, I know the 
word-breaking doesn't work quite right, especially in a word like 
"I've".  I've been relying on Pango (the internationalization module of 
Gtk) to tell me where the word breaks are, but apparently it's lying. :)
In any case, I'm aware of this issue, and I've mailed the Pango 
developer about this (though it was a while ago and he never responded; 
time to bug him again?).
Worst case, I can write my own word-breaking code.  (The linguists 
around here might shudder at the thought, but it appears pspell [the 
backend of GtkSpell] doesn't support languages like Japanese [where 
determining word boundaries is Very Hard].)


Finally, if you have any suggestions or bug reports related to spell 
checking, feel free to send them to me directly.

Thanks,
Evan Martin <address@hidden>