[Pan-users] Re: Is it possible to change the language used by the spellchecker

[Duncan]

Nicolas Cavigneaux posted <address@hidden>,
excerpted below,  on Sat, 29 May 2004 12:02:53 +0200:

> I'm wondering if it is possible to change the language used by pan's
> spellchecker without changing my locales and if possible without
> restarting pan each time I want to change it; If it's not possible, is
> there a way to desactivate/reactivate it ?

Short answer, no (but see the possible work-around, below).

This is why Mandrake compiled their package without spell checking.  They
want a GUI option to change it, according to what the guy at Mdk said, and
believe it to difficult to require that someone change an environmental
variable and restart PAN to get a different spellchecker language.

Workaround:

1.  Set up two different PAN data dirs (called ~/.pan.lang1 and
~/.pan.lang2, or whatever).

2.  Make the normal ~/.pan dir a symlink to one of the others.

3.  Create a script for each dir in 1, that resets the symlink and env-var
as appropriate, before starting PAN.

4.  Create two menu entries (or hotkey entries, or whatever you use to
invoke PAN, or simply invoke the scripts in 3 from the command line), one
for each dir in 1.

The separate data dirs are necessary if you are going to be running both
versions, because otherwise, PAN will reset the read messages to the
status of the last one closed, which wouldn't know about activity in the
other one.  At least, that's been the case when I started a second PAN
session accidentally.  It may be that  PAN only saves for the current
server (and when switching servers), however, in which case you could get
away with simply setting up two different servers in PAN, and simply
resetting the env-var in the start scripts in step three and four,
avoiding the separate data dirs and symlink changing.

It's also possible one may avoid the symlink thing, if PAN reads an
env-var if present to determine it's data dir.  I think I recall a mention
of some such on the list at one point, but it's equally likely I'm getting
mixed up and that mention was on another list, for some other application.

Another possibility: Simply use the database for the language you use
most commonly, and put words from the other language in your custom.dict. 
If you don't want to mess up the spell checking with words from the other
language for common uses, create a customized language entry, copy the
dictionary from the most used one to it, set PAN to use it, and again use
custom.dict for words from the other language.  This would keep the
checking "pure" in the standard one.

Finally, if you have the necessary skills, you could submit a patch
implementing the necessary functionality as well as any GUI option
necessary to make the switch.  This would of course be the best approach,
but it DOES require that you have the necessary programming skills.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little
temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." --
Benjamin Franklin