Re: Words containing apostrophe or hyphen

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Kevin Atkinson" <[email protected]>
To: "Ciarán Ó Duibhín" <[email protected]>
Cc: <[email protected]>
Sent: Sunday, March 22, 2009 7:07 PM
Subject: Re: [Aspell-user] Words containing apostrophe or hyphen


On Sun, 22 Mar 2009, Ciarán Ó Duibhín wrote:

> I encountered ASpell through its implementation in the UltraEdit text
> editor.
>
> I found it was not possible to add a word containing a hyphen, or a
> word containing an apostrophe at the beginning or end, to the user
> dictionary.  This is something which I need to do (in English, think
>'twas  or makin' ).

This is language specific.  Both cases can have a number of undesirable
effects.  Please see
ttp://aspell.net/man-html/Words-With-Symbols-in-Them.html for background
on some of the issues.

> In UltraEdit, the words can be added and will appear
> in a list of the dictionary, but an attempt to spellcheck then causes
> the computer to hang.

This is likely a bug somewhere.  How do you use Aspell in UltraEdit?

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Before pursuing the question of Aspell in UltraEdit, I thought I ought to
install free-standing Aspell for Windows and find out a bit about it. I did
so and performed some limited experiments after adding specials ' ***
and - *** to en.dat.

I made a small master dictionary, including such words as 'twas and 
hotch-potch, and ran it over a piece of text.  (The apostrophe character is 
not used for a quotation mark in my texts.)

My expectations were:
. 'twas in the dictionary would validate 'twas but not twas in the text
. well in the dictionary would validate well but not 'well in the text
(plausibly an error for 'well with a quotation mark)
. hotch-potch in the dictionary would validate hotch-potch in the text
without having hotch and potch in the dictionary
. although half-moon was not in the dictionary, it would still be validated
because half and moon were in the dictionary

My results did not bear out my expections at all.  Only the third of the
above four points happened as expected.  I made have made mistakes, of
course, or I may have missed something fundamental, but this is what I saw.

a dictionary containing 'twas but not twas rejects twas (as I hoped) but
also rejects 'twas (not as I hoped; suggested replacement is: 'twas)
a dictionary containing twas but not 'twas accepts twas (as I hoped) but
also accepts 'twas (not as I hoped)
a dictionary containing hotch-potch but not hotch and potch accepts
hotch-potch (as I hoped)
a dictionary not containing half-moon but containing half and moon rejects
half-moon (not as I hoped)

I'm really puzzled. Is the behaviour I observed what is expected to happen? 
Is it what happens with Aspell on other platforms?  I hate to say this :-) 
but my expected behaviour is exactly what the MS Word spell-checker does, 
and without any tweaking at all.  But we really want to do our spellchecking 
in UltraEdit, rather than exporting text to MS Word.  If there are other 
Aspell options to achieve what I want, I can request UltraEdit to support 
them.

Thanks,
Ciarán Ó Duibhín