1 The spell files included here are in Vim's special format. You can't edit
2 them. See ":help spell" for more information.
7 The files used as input for the spell files come from the OpenOffice.org spell
8 files. Most of them go under the LGPL or a similar license.
10 Copyright notices for specific languages are in README_??.txt. Note that the
11 files for different regions are merged, both to save space and to make it
12 possible to highlight words for another region different from bad words.
14 Most of the soundslike mappings come from Aspell ??_phonet.dat files:
15 ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/aspell/dict/. Most go under the GPL or LGPL copyright.
20 This involves downloading the files from the OpenOffice.org server, applying a
21 patch and running Vim to generate the .spl file. To do this all in one go use
22 the Aap program (www.a-a-p.org). It's simple to install, it only requires
25 You can also do it manually:
26 1. Fetch the right spell file from:
27 http://ftp.services.openoffice.org/pub/OpenOffice.org/contrib/dictionaries
35 4. If the language has multiple regions do the above for each region. E.g.,
36 for English there are five regions: US, CA, AU, NZ and GB.
38 5. Run Vim and execute ":mkspell". Make sure you do this with the correct
39 locale, that influences the upper/lower case letters and word characters.
40 On Unix it's something like:
41 env LANG=en_US.UTF-8 vim
42 mkspell! en en_US en_AU en_CA en_GB en_NZ
44 6. Repeat step 5 for other locales. For English you could generate a spell
45 file for latin1, utf-8 and ASCII. ASCII only makes sense for languages
46 that have very few words with non-ASCII letters.
48 Now you understand why I prefer using the Aap recipe :-).
51 MAINTAINING A LANGUAGE
53 Every language should have a maintainer. His tasks are to track the changes
54 in the OpenOffice.org spell files and make updated patches. Words that
55 haven't been added/removed from the OpenOffice lists can also be handled by
58 It is important to keep the version of the .dic and .aff files that you
59 started with. When OpenOffice brings out new versions of these files you can
60 find out what changed and take over these changes in your patch. When there
61 are very many changes you can do it the other way around: re-apply the changes
62 for Vim to the new versions of the .dic and .aff files.
64 This procedure should work well:
66 1. Obtain the zip archive with the .aff and .dic files. Unpack it as
67 explained above and copy (don't rename!) the .aff and .dic files to
68 .orig.aff and .orig.dic. Using the Aap recipe should work, it will make
71 2. Tweak the .aff and .dic files to generate the perfect .spl file. Don't
72 change too much, the OpenOffice people are not stupid. However, you may
73 want to remove obvious mistakes. And remove single-letter words that
74 aren't really words, they mess up the suggestions (English has this
75 problem). You can use the "fixdup" Vim script to find duplicate words.
77 3. Make the diff file. "aap diff" will do this for you. If a diff would be
78 too big you might consider writing a Vim script to do systematic changes.
79 Do check that someone else can reproduce building the spell file. Send the
80 result to Bram for inclusion in the distribution. Bram will generate the
81 .spl file and upload it to the ftp server (if he can't generate it you will
82 have to send him the .spl file too).
84 4. When OpenOffice makes a new zip file available you need to update the
85 patch. "aap check" should do most of the work for you: if there are
86 changes the .new.dic and .new.aff files will appear. You can now figure
87 out the differences with .orig.dic and .orig.aff, adjust the .dic and .aff
88 files and finally move the .new.dic to .orig.dic and .new.aff to .orig.aff.
90 5. Repeat step 4. regularly.