bug#17742: Acknowledgement (Support for enchant?)

[Reuben Thomas <rrt@sc3d.org>]

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On 19 December 2016 at 21:47, Reuben Thomas <rrt@sc3d.org> wrote:

>
> ​Having discovered that Aspell does not provide this information (I
> checked again, and ispell-aspell-find-dictionary does not find this
> information in the dictionaries, except for limited information about
> otherchars; for casechars and not-casechars it defaults to [:alpha:]), I
> shall investigate with the hunspell maintainers.​
>

​Hunspell has an open bug to export an API to get the casechars (which
hunspell calls "WORDCHARS"):

https://github.com/hunspell/hunspell/issues/282

It has been added to the 2.0 milestone. So it seems there is light at the
end of this particular tunnel.

I've added a comment that it would be good to have a way to get this
information from the hunspell binary too.

My suggestion on how to proceed would therefore be:

1. Assuming my patches to enchant are accepted sooner rather than later,
and there's a minor Enchant release soon, then accept an initial
implementation of Enchant support in Emacs with a fixed casechars value.
This is no worse than for Aspell.

1a. If someone wants to add a way for Emacs to parse hunspell dictionaries
when used via Enchant, that's fine by me as a temporary workaround.

2. When hunspell 2 is released, hopefully there will be an official channel
for Emacs to get this information. Any workaround introduced as per 1a
above would now be more solid.

3. Once one of Enchant's supported engines has an official way to get this
information, then it's a good time to add an API to Enchant too (and
support in the standalone binary).

Overall, there's no hurry. We have precise casechars for hunspell
dictionaries today (though as I mentioned elsewhere, there may still be
problems with using them). Enchant support for now is useful for the
spelling checkers it supports that Emacs does not; obviously, Emacs's
direct hunspell support is better for now than via Enchant. It would be
nice to fix that eventually and use only Enchant, but there's no need to
rush.

-- 
http://rrt.sc3d.org

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