Subject: Re: localization formats proposal
From: Andrew Dunbar (hippietrail@yahoo.com)
Date: Fri Jul 20 2001 - 23:18:07 CDT
--- Dom Lachowicz <dominicl@seas.upenn.edu> wrote: >
> > What it boils down to is that we ship with the
> > American hash but not the British hash. I
> strongly
> > feel the British hash has much more widespread use
> in
> > all but one English speaking country as a
> reasonable
> > stand-in for our own English dialects - which seem
> not
> > to have ispell/pspell dictionaries available.
> > A good fix would be something roughly like this:
> > * Ship with both American and British
> dicitonaries.
> > (Or have a package including British instead)
> > * Implement a "Just Works" mechanism that allows
> > en-** users to spellcheck documents with a
> "close
> > enough" dictionary instead of having no
> > spellchecking
> > (as it is now), or marking the document as some
> > other language/dialect just to get
> spellchecking.
> > * Figure out how this really should relate to our
> > locale system, options dialog, etc.
> > * Deep thought about same for different flavours
> of
> > French, German, the dialetc problem in general.
> >
> > Does that make it clearer?
>
> Ok, this is what I thought you had meant. Let me
> address it:
>
> We have the AbiSpell package. It contains a
> british.hash file that people are
> free to download and install. en-AU, en-NZ, en-GB,
> en-IE, and en-CA will use
> this hash file if it's installed. If it isn't
> installed, then all words will be
> ignored, because we don't have a proper dictionary
> for the language installed.
This is the basic solution. But we should have the
en-* locales only use en-GB as a *fallback* in case
somewhere along the line the missing dictionar hash
files come into existence.
This same mechanism would work for es-* -> es-ES,
and may also work for fr-* -> fr-FR, pt-* -> pt_PT,
de-* -> de-DE; but I don't know enough about those
languages. A generic system for fallback dictionaries
_with an option to disable_ is IMHO the ideal
solutions and will put us in front of other WPs.
Andrew.
> Now, if people want to cp american.hash british.hash
> instead of downloading a
> working hashfile from us, that's their problem, IMO.
> The alternative is there
> and it's simple (and even well-documented. i have a
> doc that explains all of
> this in simple user-terms)
>
> Also, many distributions will set up abiword to use
> their own shipped ispell
> hash files (installed in /usr/lib/ispell or
> something like that) which will use
> the system-shippe dictionaries. This means that if
> the en-GB locale is installe
> don your box, you'll have a british.hash and Abi
> will use it. This is also
> documented in my spelling.abw file.
>
> So are there any outstanding issues, or have I just
> addressed all of them?
>
> Dom
>
=====
http://linguaphile.sourceforge.net
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