Re: Bug 130397

[Juri Linkov <juri@jurta.org>]

Kenichi Handa <handa@m17n.org> writes:
> Please try the latest ispell.el.  I think at least this
> misalignment error is fixed now.

I tried the latest ispell.el and I see that your change is a definite
improvement since it now allows to check words in mule-unicode charsets.
But it still doesn't fix the misalignment error.  It even makes this
error more frequent because it now occurs in all UTF-8 texts checked
with ispell-region (which earlier were simply skipped before your change).

The cause of the error is the following: a line sent by ispell.el
to the ispell process is converted from mule-unicode charset to the
process charset, and the accepted output gets converted from process
coding to the internal Emacs charset iso8859.  So `search-forward' in
`ispell-process-line' fails to find a string in iso8859 charset
in the buffer with the same string in mule-unicode charset.

> As for this, I agree with the following statement.
>
> Geoff Kuenning <geoff@cs.hmc.edu> writes:
>> I'm not entirely sure what you mean here.  For disjoint alphabets,
>> it's certainly relatively easy to figure out which word should go to
>> which ispell instance.  For identical, superset, or overlapping
>> alphabets, the problem is basically insoluable.  For example, "fra" is
>> a misspelling in English but legal in Italian.  If it appears in a
>> mixed passage, which dictionary should it be fed to?  The only
>> solution would seem to be to require the user to mark passages in some
>> way, as is done in HTML.

I agree that marking would help ispell.el to decide which dictionary
to use on a word.  However, even without marking users might still prefer
to check words simultaneously with multiple dictionaries and to accept
a word when it's found in one dictionary, because such cases where a word
appears in both dictionaries might be too rare for two chosen languages.

A similar problem exists even within one language where a misspelled word
is still a valid word according to ispell (e.g. misspelled "male" instead
of "mail").

-- 
Juri Linkov
http://www.jurta.org/emacs/