[aspell-announce] New Version of Aspell Dicts now Available

[Kevin Atkinson]

[Please redistribute this announcement as you see fit]

The next release of Aspell dicts is now available.  Aspell dicts is an
effort to make installing word lists for non-English languages in
Aspell straightforward.

Support for the following languages is now available:
  Breton    [br]
  Catalan   [ca]
  Czech     [cs]
  Danish    [da]
  Dutch     [nl]
  Esperanto [eo]
  Faroese   [fo]
  French    [fo] (Standard [fr_FR] and Swiss French [fr_CH]
                  and in three sizes: small, medium and large)
  French    [fr]
  German    [de] (Standard [de_DE] and Swiss German [de_CH])
  Italian   [it]
  Norwegian [no]
  Polish    [pl]
  Portuguese[pt] (Standard [pt_PT] and Brazilian [pt_BR])
  Russian   [ru]
  Spanish   [es]
  Swedish   [sv]

As always you can find them off the Aspell home page
(http://aspell.sourceforge.net).

Please check them out and let me know what you think.  The layout of
the dictionaries should now be finalized however I will not declare it
final until after the next version of Pspell and Aspell is released.
These packages contain everything needed to add support for a given
language to Aspell.  These packages will also install the necessary
files so that the Word List will be correctly recognized by Pspell --
something that is often not handled correctly by Word List author's
Aspell packages.

Support for variants in languages (such as American, British,
Canadian, Swiss German, etc...) is now available, however you
currently can not use them from Pspell.  To use them with Aspell
simply specify the code (for example de_CH for Swiss German) as the
dictionary. The next version of Pspell will have this problem
corrected.

Even though the layout and "proc" script is not in its final form I
strongly encouraged Aspell Word List maintainers to look everything
over and attempt to integrate it with your current system to discover
problems and shortcomings with my system.  Shortly after the next
version of Aspell and Pspell is released I will allow authors to take
over maintenance of there Word Lists using the new system.  I have
not worked out all the details however the one basic rule is that the
word list package *must* be create with "make dist".  This will
insure that everything is OK and will force you to have everything in a
standard format.

Also, I am especially interested in feedback from Package Maintainers
(RPM, Debian, etc.).  Since the layout of the packages should now be
in the final form now would be a very good time to work on creating
new Aspell dictionary packages using my new system to discover
problems and shortcomings with it.  I want to make my system powerful
enough so that you can package it with out having to patch anything,
including the Makefile.  So if you discover the need for this I would
appreciate you letting me know about it.  Suggestions are more than
welcome, but patches to the proc script (the script which does all the
real work) are even more welcome.  I am also strongly interested in
what you think about the layout of the dictionary files and language
names.

Major changes from the last version:

  Renamed the "code" entry to "lang".

  Added support for multiple dictionaries in a single package.  This
  included support for variants in languages and multiple sizes.

  Enhanced the build system so that the aspell, pspell-config, and
  word-list-compress command can now be specified either as
  environmental variables or on the command line when running
  configure.  Also added "DESTDIR" support and support for specifying
  additional flags to pass on to Aspell when creating the word list.

---
Kevin Atkinson
kevina at users sourceforge net
http://www.ibiblio.org/kevina/