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Re: [Pan-users] spell checking?


From: Duncan
Subject: Re: [Pan-users] spell checking?
Date: Thu, 11 Sep 2014 01:53:19 +0000 (UTC)
User-agent: Pan/0.140 (Chocolate Salty Balls; GIT d447f7c /m/p/portage/src/egit-src/pan2)

Bruce Bowler posted on Wed, 10 Sep 2014 19:05:03 +0000 as excerpted:

> Window 7, pan 0.140, where do I specify the spell checking language? 
> I'm in the USofA, not the UK, and pan spell checking is insisting that I
> should spell color "colour".

For individual groups there should be a spell-check setting in group 
preferences (edit menu, at or near the bottom).  Note that it'll only 
have choices for the compatible dictionaries you have installed.  Here 
(and I guess there too), that's English, so there are choices for English 
variants, nothing else.

It has been quite some time since this topic came up and I'm not /sure/ 
it hasn't changed since then, but AFAIK, pan's global default spellcheck 
language is read from an environmental variable.  Unfortunately I don't 
recall what it was.

However, searching the /proc/<pan-pid>/environ file (on a Linux system 
listing the environment for the process with that pid, aka process-id) 
for case-insensitive "en", I see this environmental variable set:

LANG=en_US.UTF-8

So presumably at least on a Linux system, LANG is the environmental 
variable to set, with en_US.UTF-8 the value I must have set in some 
startup file somewhere, at some point.

FWIW while I'm in the US also, but spent six years as a kid in a recently 
former crown colony (Kenya, they celebrated 10 years of independence 
while I was there, in 1973, so they hadn't diverged much yet) and am 
reasonably comfortable with en_GB spellings as well, tho en_US spellings 
generally being shorter I normally adopt them.  And I don't know any 
other languages.  So I've just let pan do whatever, adding individual 
words as desired to my personal dictionary.  In many cases I'll select 
the word first, triggering a klipper (kde clipboard and selection helper 
applet) popup with a bunch of action choices based on the selection 
including googling it on google or wikipedia or wictionary.  Being a 
descriptivist and adult of some years no longer having to worry about 
somebody grading my spelling and usage, if wictionary lists the word, 
I'll normally consider the spelling valid regardless of what various 
prescriptivists might think about it and regardless of what English 
variant it might be normative (or not) in.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman




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