Re: flyspell-mode and two languages

[Xah]

On Oct 17, 1:02 pm, Memnon Anon <gegendosenflei...@googlemail.com>
wrote:
> Hi!
>
> I love flyspell-mode. But I often have to edit files containing 2
> languages, in most
> cases german and english. I was wondering how you solved this. Is
> there a way to
> define a main-language, and if the word seems to be misspelled, check
> a
> secondary-language?
>
> Any hint appreciated...

no answer to your specific question... but last time i tried flyspell
and was extremely dissatisfied  with it. For primarily 2 reasons, in
order of importance:

(1) it doesn't let me right click to select from a list of correct
spellings. What i have to do is to go to each word and do ispell-word.

(2) its vocabulary is extremely small. Words in modern journalism will
typically light it up like neolight show. (e.g. try any article from
Time mag (e.g. time.com ))

I haven't really spend time to dig solutions on these, but basically
abandoned it. What i do is to have a keyboard shortcut that open the
current buffer in TextWrangle (aka BBEdit Light), press a button then
it highlight all unkown words, then right click on each to fix, then
save, close, then back to emacs refresh buffer.

However, last week i found

• Batch style spell checker http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/SpeckMode
by Martin Rudalics.

which is really wonderful. It does (1) like most word processors. I'm
not sure if it does contain good sized vocabulary yet.

With respect to your question, possibly you could give it a try and
maybe it allows multiple lang vocabs. (i'm guessing it does. For one
thing, you could add the unknown word. However, i'm not sure where is
the source file it adds to. Did spent few min on it but didn't find
it.)

Related, if you are a dictionary buff like me, you might also like:

★ http://www.myrkr.in-berlin.de/dictionary/index.html by Torsten
Hilbrich↗ . Lookup English word definitions in emacs thru online
English dictionary server.

There are several others but this is one i tried and sufficiently
happy with.

Also, most or all emacs dicts are interface to open sourced dicts
online. Open sourced dicts are low quality when compared to pro ones.
If you work with English in some semi-pro capacity, you'll need access
to commercial ones. This i do like this:

(defun lookup-word-definition-in-w3m ()
"Look up the word's definition in a emacs-w3m.\n
If a region is active (a phrase), lookup that phrase."
 (interactive)
 (let (myword myurl)
   (setq myword
         (if (and transient-mark-mode mark-active)
             (buffer-substring-no-properties (region-beginning)
(region-end))
           (thing-at-point 'symbol)))

  (setq myword (replace-regexp-in-string " " "%20" myword))
  (setq myurl (concat "http://www.answers.com/main/ntquery?s=";
myword))
  (w3m-browse-url myurl)
   ))

The url used above is American Heritage Dict, which i find the best
among some 4 or so prof dicts that are available free online.

See also:
A Review of 3 Dictionaries
http://xahlee.org/Periodic_dosage_dir/bangu/dict_review.html

in my setup, pressing 0 on the numerical keypad gets me to def of the
current word or text selection from open sourced dict using Torsten
Hilbrich's dict mode. Pressing Shift-0 gets me to American Heritage
thru w3m to a website. Pressing Ctrl+0 gets me to Wikipedia in a
browser.

  Xah
∑ http://xahlee.org/

☄