[aspell-user] Re: Suggestion for aspell: per-document dictionaries

[Reuben Thomas]

> Aspell doesn't have a per document dictionary mainly because there is no
> real good way to store them and also because it will add more complexity
> to the user interface.  However, if you wish you can have a per-document
> personal dictionary and also use your normal personal dictionary by doing
> the following:
>
> aspell --add-extra-dicts=~/.aspell.english.pws --personal=<per-doc-dict> ...

Bingo, that's what I needed. I was really thinking of this for use with LyX,
and if there's some standard way to add extra dictionaries on the command
line, then the LyX crew can work out the other bit of the problem.

> Perhaps in the future I will have an option to save the session word list.
> Which will probably be closer to what you are looking for.

Hadn't thought of that; I'd tend not to use such an option, as I can't rely
on myself in the heat of spellchecking not just to click "Accept for this
session" on all sorts of junk. Mind you, that begs the question of how I get
the per-document wordlist in the first place...I agree that yet another
button "Add to per-document dictionary" is not attractive. Mind you, with
per-document dictionaries, perhaps I'd not often use a personal dictionary,
and hence would be happier to have two-stage dictionary maintenance, so that
during spellchecking I only get the option "add to per-document dictionary"
and not "add to personal dictionary", and then afterwards I can choose
another action to add words from the per-document dictionary to my personal
dictionary.

This sort of thing might also be a good way to reduce the size of the main
dictionaries, particularly to eliminate all sorts of words that you might
not want (you give the example "wether"). Ideally, one would like *only* a
personal dictionary, which would be quite small (most people, as I'm sure
you know, have an active vocabulary of under 10,000 words, and even if
that's root words, that's not much more than 20,000 in total, much smaller
than even the small English word list).

-- 
http://sc3d.org/rrt/ | perfect, a.  unsatirizable