Re: [aspell] LaTeX and umlauts

[Kevin Atkinson]

On 26 Jun 2000, Enrico Scholz wrote:

> I am writing german umlauts[1] by prefixing the corresponding 7bit
> chars with a double-quote (e.g. "a, "o and "u). Unfortunately aspell
> doesn't recognize " as a letter (entry in iso8859-1.dat) and the
> available dictionaries are containing the umlauts as 8bit characters
> only.
> 
> (The same thing happens when I write the umlauts as 'ae','oe'... in
> german emails)
> 
> Well, I could create my own dictionary with quoted umlauts and saying "
> is a letter, but this is just an ugly hack (I believe ispell recognizes
> this encoding automatically).

If you want to use a hack make the " as a middle character not a letter
otherwise the quotes will cause all sorts of problems as anything that
ends is a quote will be considered a misspelling.

> Does there exists a more smart way to handle this issue?

Not yet, Aspell .33 _should_ have it.  That release is expected by the end
of July.  The next aspell release, version .32, will not have it.

> Footnotes: 
> [1]  no, I can not simple type the 8bit umlauts because I am writing on
>      an english keyboard...

You probably can using the Compose key.  If you are using Linux and don't
have one Xfree can fake it for you using the scroll lock or some other
key.

-- 
Kevin Atkinson
address@hidden
http://metalab.unc.edu/kevina/