The basic format of the language data file is the same as it is for the
Aspell configuration file. It is named lang
.dat
and is
located in the architecture independent data dir for Aspell (option
data-dir
) which is usually prefix
/share/aspell
.
Use aspell config
to find out where it is in your
installation. By convention the language name should be the two letter
ISO 639 language code if it exists, if not use the three letter code.
The language data file has several mandatory fields, and several optional ones. All fields are case sensitive and should be in all lower case.
The two mandatory fields are name
and charset
.
name
is the name of the language and should be the same as the
file name (without the .dat
).
charset
is the 8-bit character set Aspell will expect the
word lists to be formatted in. If possible choose from one of the
standard ones provided with Aspell. These are iso-8859-*
,
koi8-*
, or viscii
. If your language does not require
any non-ascii characters choose iso-8859-1
. If one of these
standard character sets is not suitable for your language than you can
create a new one. See Creating A New Character Set.
The optional fields are as follows:
data-encoding
utf-8
or any of the 8-bit encoding that Aspell
supports. If not set, then it defaults to charset
.
special
'
and -
. The format for the value is a list separated by
spaces. Each item of the list has the following format.
<char> <begin><middle><end>
char is the non letter character in question.
begin, middle, end are either a
-
or a *
. A star for begin means that the
character can begin a word, a -
means it can't. The same is
true for middle and end. For example, the entry
for the '
in English is:
' -*-
To include more than one middle character just list them one after
another on the same line. For example, to make both the '
and the -
a middle character, use the following line in the
language data file:
special ' -*- - -*-
soundslike
name_phonetic.dat
.
If name is simpile
then a very simple soundslike is
used. This is nearly as powerful as full phonetic soundslike but it
can be computed a lot faster. (see The Simple Soundslike)
If the soundslike name is none
, or this option is not specified,
than no soundslike will be used. The effective soundslike is the word
converted to all lowercase and possibly with accents stripped
depending on the store-as
option. For languages with
phonetic spelling the difference will not be very noticeable.
However, for languages with non-phonetic spelling there will be a
noticeable difference. The difference you notice will depend on the
quality of the soundslike data file. If you do not notice much of a
difference for a language with non-phonetic spelling that is a good
indication that the soundslike data is not rough enough--or the words
you are trying are not that badly misspelled.
invisible-soundslike
none
or simpile
, and false when a phonetic soundslike is
used.
repl-table
keyboard
sug-split-char
affix
affix-compress
partially-expand
store-as
norm-required
normalize
norm-form
Additional options includes options to control how run-together words are handled the same way as they are in the normal configuration files. for more information, please Controlling the Behavior of Run-together Words.