Re: ispell/flyspell and german umlauts

[Oliver Scholz <alkibiades@gmx.de>]

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!