[Aspell-user] [Aspell user] Installation Aspell and Emacs under Windows

[Harald von Aschen]

Hi,

Thank you very much for your phantastic spell checker.

Because of Uwe Siarts article "Installation von GNU Emacs and AUCTeX unter 
MS Windows" in the "Die TeXnische Komoedie", issue 4/2004 I have tried to 
use Aspell under Emacs with Windows 98/II.  (The article is available on 
Uwe's Homepage only in German
http://www.uwe-siart.de/typografie/latex.html

Because it was a not so easy task here my steps:

a) My clean emacs installation is GNU Emacs 21.3.1 (2004-03-10) from
   http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs

b) I got Aspell for win32 from
   http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/aspell/w32/Aspell-0-50-3-3-Setup.exe

After setting (setq-default ispell-program-name "aspell") and setting the 
environment variable path to the aspell/bin path all should work. I have 
opened a *.tex file and then Tools->Spell Checking ->Spell-check buffer.
1. call: starting new ispell process...
        aspell did not output version line
2. call: Ispell misalignment: word `#)' point 1; probably incompatible versions
3. call: now Aspell works: menu-bar tools spell ispell-buffer-

The second error message will be left out if I wait a long time (about 3 
minutes).

Then Aspell is working but my local dictionary where I insert new words 
with "i" will not be updated even when I click on Save Dictionary. No 
entries in *.pws. What's going on here? Let's do a look in ispell.el 
(version 3.4). It seems that all commands are passed to Aspell like the 
Aspell docu is saying for "through a pipe". O.k. line 1722 might be wrong, 
Aspell wants a "&" for putting a word in lowercase letters in the pws. Hm. 
But your mailing list has helped me a lot. Message

http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/aspell-user/2004-04/msg00034.html

points to

http://www.kdstevens.com/~stevens/ispell-page.html

where I have downloaded the latest development release 3.7beta and replaced 
the emacs ispell.el (version 3.4) by this file. And I have set the 
environmental variable $home to an appropriate location. Then all is 
working phantastic, Aspell is saving my *.pws in $home no error messages 
any more, quick start in Emacs.

BTW: If you have problems with your environmental variables and do not want 
to increase the reserved memory for them (see
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;230205 for a 
resolution) you can put the path to Aspell in your emacs startup file e.g.
(setq-default ispell-program-name "f:/programme/aspell/bin/aspell")
This will also work.

Thank you very much for your phantastic program!

Best regards

Harald