Aspell and Unicode

Lets try this again.....

The Aspell LIBRARY supports Unicode fairly well.  All one has to do is set 
the encoding and everything is converted on the fly.

The Aspell UTILITY doesn't really support Unicode at this time.  Although
if you set the encoding to UTF-8 the 'PIPE' mode will probably work and
the 'CHECK' mode will sort of work.  The issue with the 'check' mode is
using Unicode with the curses library correctly.

The REST of the Aspell utility does not support Unicode.  The encoding 
used is whatever the dictionary is encoded in.

INTERNALLY the core Aspell library (everything in modules/speller/default) 
is 8-bit and is very likely to stay that way.

However, that DOESN'T mean that the end user has to know this.  
Everything read in by Aspell and everything printed out can be in UTF-8 or
some other encoding.  The only person that REALLY has to be aware of the
8-bit issue is the dictionary maintainers as they must chose an 8-bit
character set for Aspell to use.  Even the word list can be in Unicode as
Aspell can convert it when creating the dictionary.

But, Aspell is not there yet.  There are several issues in supporting 
Unicode.  The main issue is converting everything read in and printed out 
from the internal 8-bit encoding to Unicode.  But an other issue is 
knowing what encoding the various data files are in.  There is no 
reason they can't be in Unicode but Aspell has to know to convert it.  
Thus they need to be tagged in someway.  By data files I mean any human 
readable files that Aspell uses.

Ideally the Aspell utility use the LC_CTYPE for the encoding, however 
using LC_CTYPE to figure out how the data files are encoded will lead to 
nothing but trouble.

So, I HOPE to get all this done by Aspell 0.51 but I don't know if I will.  
If someone would like to assist me in this task I would really appreciate 
it.

I hope this makes everything clear, as I was not very clear before.  If 
you still have questions fell free to ask.

PS: Please fell free to forward this to others.

--- 
http://kevin.atkinson.dhs.org