ispell/flyspell and german umlauts

ispell/flyspell and german umlauts

[Karl Voit]

Hi!

I am using emacs 21.3.2 and flyspell. I managed to configure it to
german as standard dictionary. But when I am using emacs to write
usegroup postings, I prefer tying 'ae' instead of umlaut-'a' and so
on. Unfortunately, my postings are messed up with flyspell-formatting
for unknown words because of the ispell-dictionary that only got words
with 'real' umlauts.

Is there a way to overcome this problem?

-- 
Karl VOIT, Graz University of Technology (Austria/Europe)

Re: ispell/flyspell and german umlauts

[Oliver Scholz]

Karl Voit <devnull@Karl-Voit.at> writes:

> Hi!
>
> I am using emacs 21.3.2 and flyspell. I managed to configure it to
> german as standard dictionary. But when I am using emacs to write
> usegroup postings, I prefer tying 'ae' instead of umlaut-'a' and so
> on. 

[Huh? In the year 2003? In stark contrast to this I don't use even ISO
8859 anymore ... Well, YMMV.]

> Unfortunately, my postings are messed up with flyspell-formatting
> for unknown words because of the ispell-dictionary that only got
> words with 'real' umlauts.
>
> Is there a way to overcome this problem?
[...]

To get exactly what you describe, you'd had to make sure that the
communication with the ispell process, so that Words in the
Duden-“encoding” are decoded to ISO 8859-1. While this should be
possible, it is also error prone: zuerst -> zuerst, aerodynamisch -->
aerodynamisch etc. And there is no sensible way to deal with ss and ss.
And you'd have to create a new coding system.

[In fact I tried exactly this, because I am fascinated by the CCL
language use for writing coding systems. My coding system works
flawlessly with `encode-coding-region', but when I try to use it for
communicating with ispell, Emacs hangs. Does anybody have an idea for
possible reasons?]

I'd say it's a lot easier, however, to write your messages as usual
with umlauts and encode this to duden upon sending it. Try to add
this to your .gnus:

(add-hook 'message-send-hook 'kv-message-good-old-times)

(defun kv-message-good-old-times ()
  (iso-iso2duden (save-excursion (message-goto-body)
				 (point))
		 (point-max)))

I'll test this with this message by yanking in a paragraph from the
German Emacs tutorial:

    Zunaechst muessen Sie wissen, wie man sich innerhalb eines Dokuments
    bewegen kann. Wie man eine Bildschirmseite vorwaerts blaettert,
    wissen Sie schon (C-v). Mit M-v blaettern Sie eine Bildschirmseite
    zurueck (halten Sie die META-Taste gedrueckt und geben Sie v ein,
    oder druecken Sie zuerst <ESC> und anschliessend v).


    Oliver
-- 
14 Thermidor an 211 de la Révolution
Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité!

Re: ispell/flyspell and german umlauts

[Oliver Scholz]

Oliver Scholz <alkibiades@gmx.de> writes:

[...]
> While this should be possible, it is also error prone: zuerst ->
> zuerst, aerodynamisch --> aerodynamisch etc. And there is no
   ^^                       ^^
> sensible way to deal with ss and ss. And you'd have to create a new
> coding system.
[...]

I forgot that I was going to enable the code I posted for testing. 
I origninally wrote:

zuerst --> zürst, aerodynamisch --> ärodynamisch

    Oliver
-- 
14 Thermidor an 211 de la Révolution
Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité!

Re: ispell/flyspell and german umlauts

[Karl Voit]

* Oliver Scholz <alkibiades@gmx.de> wrote:
> Karl Voit <devnull@Karl-Voit.at> writes:
> 
>> I am using emacs 21.3.2 and flyspell. I managed to configure it to
>> german as standard dictionary. But when I am using emacs to write
>> usegroup postings, I prefer tying 'ae' instead of umlaut-'a' and so
>> on. 
> 
> [Huh? In the year 2003? In stark contrast to this I don't use even ISO
> 8859 anymore ... Well, YMMV.]

Well, I didn't thought that _this_ might be misunderstood :-)

I prefer typing 'ae' instead of 'ä' not only because of being nice to
non-german speaking configurations but because of my english keyboard
layout. 

> I'd say it's a lot easier, however, to write your messages as usual
> with umlauts and encode this to duden upon sending it.

TNX for this workaround but because of my keyboard layout, I'd prefer
another solution or I just skip flyspell-check for usenet :-(

-- 
Karl VOIT, Graz University of Technology (Austria/Europe)

Re: ispell/flyspell and german umlauts

[Jesper Harder]

Karl Voit <devnull@Karl-Voit.at> writes:

> I prefer typing 'ae' instead of 'ä' not only because of being nice
> to non-german speaking configurations but because of my english
> keyboard layout.

You might like one of the German input methods -- e.g. german-prefix
or german-postfix (select them with `C-x RET C-\').

With the first method input is translated like:

     "a -> ä, "o -> ö  etc.

with the second like:

     ae -> ä,  oe -> ö  etc.

Re: ispell/flyspell and german umlauts

[Gernot Hassenpflug]

[-- Warning: decoded text below may be mangled, UTF-8 assumed --]
[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 964 bytes --]

Jesper Harder <harder@myrealbox.com> writes:

> Karl Voit <devnull@Karl-Voit.at> writes:
>
> You might like one of the German input methods -- e.g. german-prefix
> or german-postfix (select them with `C-x RET C-\').
>
> With the first method input is translated like:
>
>      "a -> ä, "o -> ö  etc.
>
> with the second like:
>
>      ae -> ä,  oe -> ö  etc.

Well that is very nice indeed. I often wonder how people do this with
with a non-German keyboard layout. I have been using the somewhat
clumsy but workable method using default bindings:

C-q M-D -> Ä
C-q M-d -> ä
C-q M-V -> Ö
C-q M-v -> ö
C-q M-\ -> Ü
C-q M-| -> ü
C-q M-_ -> ß

I suppose this is laughable, I will check out the methods you
suggest. The former reminds me of LaTeX, but the latter requires less
typing (no Shift key to get the "). I imagine the instructions for the
package also tell how to get the Ess-Zett sign.

Regards,
    Gernot
-- 
G Hassenpflug RASC, Kyoto University

Re: ispell/flyspell and german umlauts

[Reiner Steib]

On Wed, Aug 06 2003, Gernot Hassenpflug wrote:

> Jesper Harder <harder@myrealbox.com> writes:
>> You might like one of the German input methods -- e.g. german-prefix
>> or german-postfix (select them with `C-x RET C-\').
>> 
>> With the first method input is translated like:
>> 
>>      "a -> ä, "o -> ö  etc.
>> 
>> with the second like:
>> 
>>      ae -> ä,  oe -> ö  etc.

Does anyone really use the latter?  I'm thinking of words that _do_
contain `ae' (not ä) etc. in German (see Oliver's posting
<news:uisphppkz.fsf@ID-87814.user.dfncis.de>).  Typing `aee' for `ae'
seems really weird.

> Well that is very nice indeed. I often wonder how people do this with
> with a non-German keyboard layout. 

I use Alt_R+a for `ä' and so on (US keyboard layout):

cat <<EOF | xmodmap -
  keysym 1     = 1 exclam       onesuperior
  keysym 2     = 2 at           twosuperior
  keysym a     = a A            adiaeresis        Adiaeresis
  keysym o     = o O            odiaeresis        Odiaeresis
  keysym u     = u U            udiaeresis        Udiaeresis
  keysym s     = s S            ssharp
  keysym comma  = comma less     guillemotleft
  keysym period = period greater guillemotright
EOF

The advantage is, that it works for all (X-) applications, not only
Emacs.

Gernot, please check your T-Gnus and/or Emacs settings.  Your message
didn't contain a proper Content-Type header (e.g. "Content-Type:
text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1") and you Umlaut characters were sent
as `\201ä' (character: \201 (0201, 129, 0x81); charset:
eight-bit-control (8-bit control code (0x80..0x9F))).

Maybe you have `standard-display-european' in your config files?  If
so, try to remove it.

,----[ C-h f standard-display-european RET ]
| standard-display-european is a compiled Lisp function in `disp-table'.
| (standard-display-european ARG)
| 
| Semi-obsolete way to toggle display of ISO 8859 European characters.
`----

Bye, Reiner.
-- 
       ,,,
      (o o)
---ooO-(_)-Ooo--- PGP key available via WWW   http://rsteib.home.pages.de/

Re: ispell/flyspell and german umlauts

[A. L. Meyers]

Real English (not what the Yanks write) does include the "ae" character
(I am not writing it here) in words like "aesthetic".

Cheers!

Lucien
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Re: ispell/flyspell and german umlauts

[Jesper Harder]

Gernot Hassenpflug <gernot@kurasc.kyoto-u.ac.jp> writes:

> Jesper Harder <harder@myrealbox.com> writes:
>
>> You might like one of the German input methods --
>> e.g. german-prefix or german-postfix (select them with `C-x RET
>> C-\').
>
> Well that is very nice indeed. I often wonder how people do this with
> with a non-German keyboard layout.

Under X11 you can also use the Multi-key, e.g.

      Multi-a " -> ä,  Multi-s s -> ß

The different compositions are listed in

    /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/locale/iso8859-1/Compose

> I imagine the instructions for the package also tell how to get the
> Ess-Zett sign.

Yes, you can do `C-h I' do describe an input method.  Oh, and you need
the LEIM package -- it might not be installed by default.

Re: ispell/flyspell and german umlauts

[Sven Utcke]

Karl Voit <devnull@Karl-Voit.at> writes:

> Hi!
> 
> I am using emacs 21.3.2 and flyspell. I managed to configure it to
> german as standard dictionary. But when I am using emacs to write
> usegroup postings, I prefer tying 'ae' instead of umlaut-'a' and so
> on. Unfortunately, my postings are messed up with flyspell-formatting
> for unknown words because of the ispell-dictionary that only got words
> with 'real' umlauts.
> 
> Is there a way to overcome this problem?

Sure, no problem --- my .emacs e.g. containes:

(setq ispell-dictionary-alist		; sk  9-Aug-1991 18:28
      '((nil				; default (english.aff)
	 "[A-Za-z]" "[^A-Za-z]" "[---']" nil ("-B" "-S") nil)
[...]
	("deutsch-tex"			; deutsch.aff
	 "[a-zA-Z\"]" "[^a-zA-Z\"]" "[']" t ("-C" "-S" "-d" "deutsch") "~tex")
	("deutsch-ascii"		; deutsch.aff
	 "[a-zA-Z]" "[^a-zA-Z]" "[']" t ("-C" "-S" "-d" "deutsch") "~ascii")
	("deutsch8"
	 "[a-zA-ZÄÖÜäößü]" "[^a-zA-ZÄÖÜäößü]" "[']" t ("-C" "-S" "-d" "deutsch") "~latin1" iso-latin-1)
	("neu-deutsch-tex"			; deutsch.aff
	 "[a-zA-Z\"]" "[^a-zA-Z\"]" "[']" t ("-C" "-S" "-d" "ndeutsch") "~tex")
	("neu-deutsch-ascii"		; deutsch.aff
	 "[a-zA-Z]" "[^a-zA-Z]" "[']" t ("-C" "-S" "-d" "ndeutsch") "~ascii")
	("neu-deutsch8"
	 "[a-zA-ZÄÖÜäößü]" "[^a-zA-ZÄÖÜäößü]" "[']" t ("-C" "-S" "-d" "ndeutsch") "~latin1" iso-latin-1)
[...]

So you simply tell i/fly-spell to use neu-deutsch-ascii (oh, btw,
ndeutsch is a link to german.aff/hash :-)

Sven
-- 
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