[aspell-user] Re: Including Personal Dictionaries...

[Kevin Atkinson]

Someone wrote:

> We are currently using your
> aspell application in coordination with a spelling checking
> module on one of our sites via the Lingua::Ispell perl
> module.  However, we are running into a problem and we seem
> to be having trouble locating the method to solve it with
> your Aspell documentation.  The site in particular that we
> are working on has large amounts of medical content which
> your application does not seem to recognize, which is fine.
> However, we read in your documentation that it is possible
> to configure Aspell to allow for any number of words we
> would want to append to the existing Aspell dictionary.
> Yet, like I said before, we are having a hard time finding
> the actual process to accomplish this task.  Any help you
> could give us would be much appreciated.  We are very
> pleased with your application thus far and would love to get
> the most use out of it as possible.  Thanks for your time.

The easiest thing to do is to create a separate dictionary with the
medical terms using something like

aspell create master ./dict_name < med_lst

where med_lst is the list of medical terms and dict_name is the name of
the complied word list (See sec 4.1 of the Aspell manual for more
information).  You can then load this dictionary (in addition to the normal
word list) by using --add-extra-dicts=<dict name>.  If the new dictionary
is not in the same location as the normal dictionaries then <dict name>
must be the extra path.

If speed is of a concern (too many dictionaries can slow things down) that
you might want to create a new dictionary which included all of the
Aspell words plus the additional medical terms.  To do this you can do
something like.

aspell dump master | cat - <medical word list> \
  | aspell create master ./<dict name>

and then only load that word list using --master=<dict name>

---
Kevin Atkinson
kevina at users sourceforge net
http://www.ibiblio.org/kevina/