[AUCTeX-devel] multilingual aspell in tex-mode with babel package

[Alexey Abrikosov]

Dear sirs!

I'm using emacsW32 + Auctex + Aspell to work on my LaTeX-files. 
Unfortunately lately they were bilingual (English-Russian and v.v.). As 
far as I understand making Aspell to work on multilingual files is a 
technically difficult unsolved problem.

The difficulty is that Aspell makes use of language-specific checking 
procedure and can not distinguish what rules to apply to the current 
fragment of multilanguage text.

However for multilingual LaTeX with ``babel'' package this is not a 
problem. Here are my reasons and proposal.

a) the preamble contains the line that lists all the languages. In my 
files it reads:

\usepackage[english,russian]{babel} % Russ(main) + English

Note, that the main language is the last one in brackets. By default the 
entire text is supposed be written in the main language (this determines 
the character set, hyphenation rules, chapter names etc.)

b) There are language switching commands in BABEL. In order to switch 
from Russian to English the command
    \English is used;
From here on the English character set and hyphenation are used 
(Chapter names remain the same, Glava).
The back switch is
    \Russian
In principle there are no limitations on number of language modes in 
single document.

The proposal is to use the BABEL language list and language switching 
commands for loading and changing the current Aspell dictionaries. For 
me this looks quite feasible in Auctex. Unfortunately I'm not qualified 
in programming and may be fundamentally wrong.

Thank you in advance for any comments.

Yours sincerely,
Alexey Abrikosov.