Re: ispell/aspell misalignment

[Glenn Morris <gmorris+mail@ast.cam.ac.uk>]

Richard Stallman wrote:

>     Anyway, just for the record, while I get the same error with aspell
>     .33.7.1 alpha, the latest version of aspell, namely 0.50.2, works
>     fine.
>
> In that case, all we need to do is document it in etc/PROBLEMS.
> Would someone like to write an entry?

I would be happy to (PROBLEMS already suggests upgrading Ispell, but not
Aspell), but, having just tried a more thorough spell-check test, I'm not
so sure.

Aspell 0.50.2 called via Emacs certainly performs correctly in the simple
test case in the original bug report, and Aspell .33.7.1 alpha certainly
fails with the misalignment error.

I have just tried spell-checking a large LaTeX document from Emacs using
both versions of Aspell. The new version does not seem to spell-check the
whole document: if I add a deliberate mistake near the end and run
`ispell-buffer', the error is not found. No errors from Emacs, just a
"Spell-checking done" message. The spell check seems to finish too quickly
for the whole document to have been checked.

If I use `ispell-region' on a small region around the error, or use the old
Aspell, the mistake is found.

It's surely worse if a spell-check silently misses mistakes, rather than
throwing up a "misalignment" error - at least that can be worked around (to
some extent) with ispell-region. So I don't know if it's good to recommend
upgrading Aspell. Maybe I haven't compiled the new Aspell version properly,
or something, but in all other respects it seems OK.