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Aspell

Notes about Aspell, more particularly notes about Aspell and the Windows installers.

Aspell

Aspell is located on SourceForge.

• <add-linke-to-soureceforge>

Aspell is modular, a spell checker and separate dictionaries for different languages.

In other words, to use Aspell, both the program and a suitable dictionary needs to be installed.

The LyX Windows installers attempts to install both Aspell and suitable dictionaries. The Aspell application itself can be downloaded from SourceForge for Windows, but not the dictionaries. We therefore create separate dictionary installers to create the dictionaries for different languages.

Aspell dictionaries

Some related discussions on the LyX developers' list:

• LyXDevelThreadRoot:87981

Location of dictionary installers

The dictionary installers are primarily located at

Alternative download repository:

Location of old dictionary installers

Dictionary installers used by the old (official) LyX installers used to be stored in the wiki's uploads directory.

Category tag

Dictionary format

The current dictinary format has number '6', and it is not expected to change soon.

Name of a dictonary installer for Windows

The name a dictionary installer can be as follows:

> .../aspell6-windows/aspell6-af-0.50-0.exe

• The '6' in 'aspell6' stands for dictonary format '6'.
• The af stands for the language
• The '0.50-0' stands for the version of the dictionary.

New versions of dictionaries

A new dictionary installer for a language may be created because:

• A new version of dictionary database is released
• A bug is fixed with the installer itself

How will we deal with old versions of dictionary (installers)?

When a new dictionary comes along, we'll eventually catch up and produce a corresponding dictonary installer. Then we'll eventually make an updated LyX installer, that'll refer to the new dictionary installer. However, the old LyX installers will still refer to the old dictionary installer, so in order to not break those we need keep the old dictionary installers around.

Latest version of dictionaries

One way to make the installer always use the latest version of a dictonary installer, could to use symbolic links (called e.g. aspell6-af-latest.exe) on the FTP-server.

Alternative dictionary software

• Joost says many projects have started using Hunspell.

Categories

Category: Development, Windows installer