
     Short description
     =================

Ispell is a fast screen-oriented spelling checker that shows you your
errors in the context of the original file, and suggests possible 
corrections when it can figure them out.  Compared to UNIX spell, it
is faster and much easier to use.  Ispell can also handle languages
other than English. Ispell has a long history, and many people have
contributed to the current version - some of the major contributors
include R. E. Gorin, Pace Willisson, Walt Buehring, and Geoff 
Kuenning. 

The easiest usage is 'ispell filename'. In this case ispell presents you
every word it couldn't find in the dictionary and asks you for a correction.
Are there any similar words (only differ in letters, a pair of mixed up
letters or even blanks) they are shown in the line beneath.
Ispell even shows you a list of words that derive from the same stem. Both
lines are posted on the lower edge of the monitor. If possible ispell
inverts the word. Now you can totally replace or choose one of the suggested
words.
The default language is English which can be set using the environment
variable DICTIONARY or the startup option '-d <languag>'. Using the 
'-T <format>' switch one can use special 'umlaut' modes' or turn them off.
'-T latin1' e.g. enables you to read German umlauts according to 
iso 8859-1.  If you set the '-t' flag you can (works with 3.1.20) check
(La)TeX texts with real ISO-8859-1 umlauts for misspelling. Without the
'-T latin1' the correct extension of the files are compelling. The 
possible extensions and codes for the '-T' flag are to be found in the
appropriate file which resides under '<language>.aff'. All syllable rules
and codings are put into these '.aff' files therefore it is not longer
necessary to invoke ispell with the '-w' switch for German umlauts.
To set the default language of ispell for all applications (e.g. emacs)
the user has to put the following line into the file ~/.bashrc:

    export DICTIONARY=english

Besides the English dictionaries there are German dictionaries under
/usr/lib/ispell. The German word tables have been retrieved from the
dicts-package (hk-deutsch).

Ispell doesn't 'directly' use those tables but the larger hash tables which
enable you a better and faster reading. How to create hash tables is
explained also in those above-mentioned README files or ask the man page
of ispell for help.

On computer with low RAM, problems can occur with those large hash tables.
If this is your problem just change directory to /usr/lib/ispell and delete
the symbolic links deutsch.hash or english.hash and recreate them 
using the following syntax:

    `ln -s deutschmed.hash deutsch.hash'

    `ln -s britishmed.hash english.hash'

The following hash tables are used with this version of ispell:
for English:

    americanmed.hash  (small)                                             

    americanlxg.hash  (big)                                              

    britishmed.hash   (small)                                             

    britishlxg.hash   (big)                                              

for German (package igerman):                                             

    deutschmed.hash   (middle)                                            

    deutschlxg.hash   (big)      


for German, new spelling (package ingerman):
 
     germanmed.hash   (mittel)
 
     germanlxg.hash   (groß)

for Danish (package idanish):

    dansk.hash        (middle)

for Spanish (package ispanish):

    espanol.hash      (big)

for French (package ifrensh):

    francais.hash     (middle)

for Italian (package iitalian):

    italian.hash      (middle)

for Dutch (package idutch):

    nederlands.hash   (big)

for Swedish (package iswedish):

    svenska.hash      (small)

for Norwegian (package inorsk):

    norsk.hash        (mittel)


