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Aspell

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

1.  Aspell

Note: Beginning with 2.0 support for the aspell command line program has been dropped. Although the aspell library (aspell 0.60.x) is still supported, Windows binaries are compiled without this feature. Windows users should thus use either Hunspell or Enchant.

Aspell is located on SourceForge.

• http://sourceforge.net/projects/aspell/

Aspell itself does not provide a windows installer for Aspell6. If you need to install Aspell separately on windows, it can be downloaded from the LyX repositories:

• ftp://ftp.lyx.org/pub/lyx/contrib/aspell6-windows/

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.

2.  Aspell dictionaries

Some related discussions on the LyX developers' list:

• LyXDevelThreadRoot:87981

2.1  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

2.2  Dictionary format

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

2.3  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.

2.4  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.

2.5  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.

3.  Categories

Category: Development, Windows installer