Re: Adding ispell-multi.el and friends to Emacs

[Peter Heslin <pj@heslin.eclipse.co.uk>]

Juri Linkov <juri@jurta.org> writes:

>>> > I think it should be the default.  Most users won't make real use of
>>> > more than one dictionary, so they won't lose anything.  Those that do
>>> > should get the benefit of this.
>>> 
>>> I think almost everyone whose native language isn't English does make
>>> use of more than one dictionary...
>>
>> But usually not at the same time.
>
> Spell-checking of mixed multi-language texts is not a rare need.
>
> How well does ispell-multi.el deal with this?  Can it detect different
> languages in the same buffer and check them with different ispell
> dictionaries? 

Yes, but only for flyspell (this is exactly what flyspell-babel and
flyspell-xml-lang do).  Flyspell provides a hook it calls before
spell-checking each word, which makes it easy ensure the correct
dictionary for each word in the buffer.

I don't use ispell on its own, so I did not look previously into what it
would take to add this feature to ispell-buffer and friends. I have
taken a quick look now at ispell.el and it seems that ispell-buffer
sends the text of the buffer to the ispell process one line at a time.
This design makes it impossible to switch language in mid-line.

Perhaps it would be a simple change to modify ispell-process-line so
that it loops over the words in a line and sends each one to ispell
individually, switching processes if the language has changed.  Or it
might be hairy to change that function -- I don't know the code well
enough to guess what the complications might be.

Peter

-- 
Peter Heslin (http://www.dur.ac.uk/p.j.heslin)