[Pan-users] Re: Spell checker: support for multiple languages

[Duncan]

Rui Maciel <address@hidden> posted
address@hidden, excerpted below, on  Wed, 18 Jun
2008 21:36:58 +0100:

> Some Pan users are multilingual and subscribe to newsgroups that differ
> in the adopted language. To that class of users, the ability to spell
> check posts in multiple languages is extremely useful. Unfortunately
> that is a feature that Pan doesn't offer.
> 
> It would be great if Pan enabled it's users to spell check posts in
> multiple languages. If it was possible to specify the language for each
> individual newsgroups then it would be awesome.
> 
> How about it? What are your thoughts on this feature?

AFAIK, pan checks an environmental variable to see which language to 
spellcheck in.  If I'm not mistaken, that's the way GTK+ handles it, and 
pan is of course a GTK+ app.  I'm English-only so don't worry about it or 
remember the details, but try LANG.

That means that you can set it per pan session, but unfortunately, not 
per group or per post.  There has been the request a number of times over 
the years, but AFAIK Charles wasn't really enthused about going against 
whatever norm it was he was following (again, GTK+ I think, but may be 
wrong on that).

One thing you CAN do, however, is setup a starter script that sets the 
variable appropriately, then launches pan.  Set up multiple scripts if 
you'd like, one for each language.

In fact, pan (new-pan anyway, 0.132 current, I don't believe old-pan, 
0.14.x, supported this) checks the PAN_HOME environmental variable for 
its config and data location, too, so it's possible to setup multiple 
instances, each with its own configuration and data.  Here, I have three 
independent configs, text, binary, and test, but you can setup your 
configs as desired.  By combining this with the LANG thing, you can 
subscribe only to groups in the appropriate language for that pan 
instance.

Once you have multiple instances setup, there's nothing stopping you from 
running more than one at once, if desired.  Of course, if you have them 
pointed at the same servers, if you run them together, you'll have to 
configure the number of connections for each instance so they don't 
exceed your total allowed connections for each server, but other than 
that, they shouldn't interfere with each other, provided you are pointing 
them at separate config dirs using the PAN_HOME variable.

-- 
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