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Next: 3. Basic Usage Up: GNU Aspell 0.50.4.1 Previous: 1. Introduction   
Contents

Subsections

  * 2.1 Requirements
  * 2.2 Obtaining
  * 2.3 Support
  * 2.4 Helping Out
  * 2.5 Compiling & Installing
      + 2.5.1 Generic Install Instructions
      + 2.5.2 General Problems
      + 2.5.3 Curses Notes
      + 2.5.4 Upgrading from Aspell .33/Pspell .12
      + 2.5.5 Upgrading from a pre-release snapshot
      + 2.5.6 Win32 Notes
          o 2.5.6.1 Getting
          o 2.5.6.2 Building
          o 2.5.6.3 (PD)Curses
          o 2.5.6.4 Directories
          o 2.5.6.5 Installer
          o 2.5.6.6 Win32 consoles
   
  * 2.6 Using aspell-import

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2. Getting Started


2.1 Requirements

Aspell requires gcc 2.95 (or better) as the C++ compiler. Other C++
compilers should work with some effort. Other C++ compilers for mostly
POSIX compliant (Unix, Linux, BeOS, CygWin) systems should work with out
any major problems provided that the compile can handle all of the
advanced C++ features Aspell uses. C++ compilers for non-Unix systems
might work but it will take some work. Aspell at very least requires a
Unix-like environment (sh, grep, sed, tr, etc...) in order to build.
Aspell also uses a few POSIX functions when necessary.

2.2 Obtaining

The latest version can always be found at GNU Aspell's home page at http:/
/aspell.net.

2.3 Support

Support for Aspell can be found on the Aspell mailing lists. Instructions
for joining the various mailing lists (and an archive of them) can be
found off the Aspell home page at http://aspell.net.

2.4 Helping Out

I have very little time to work on Aspell so I desperately need other
people to help with the development of Aspell. There are a lot of things
that need to be done before I consider Aspell complete. See section B.1
for a list of them. I would really appreciate some help with doing them.
If you are interested in helping with one of them please let me know.

I am also looking for someone to eventually take over the maintenance and
development of Aspell. If you are interested please contact me directly.

2.5 Compiling & Installing

2.5.1 Generic Install Instructions

    ./configure && make

For additional configure options type ./configure --help. You can control
what C++ compiler is used by setting the environmental variable CXX before
running configure and you can control what flags are passed to the C++
compile via the environmental variable CXXFLAGS. Static libraries are
disabled by default since static libraries will not work right due to the
mixing of C and C++. When a C program links with the static libraries in
Aspell it is likely to crash because Aspell's C++ objects are not getting
initialized correctly. However, if for some reason you want them, you can
enable them via --enable-static.

Aspell should then compile with out any additional user intervention. If
you run into problems please first check the sections below as that might
solve your problem.

To install the program simply type

    make install

After Aspell is installed at least one dictionary needs to be installed.
You can find them at http://aspell.net/. The "aspell" program must be in
your path in order for the dictionaries to install correctly.

If you do not have Ispell or the traditional Unix "spell" utility
installed on your system than you should also copy the compatibly scripts
"ispell" and "spell" located in the scripts/ directory into your
binary directory which is usually /usr/local/bin so that programs that
expect ispell or spell command will work correctly.

2.5.2 General Problems

Aspell does not use a released version of GNU Libtool. If you have a need
to modify configure.ac or any of the Makefile.am's you should install the
CVS version of libtool.

2.5.3 Curses Notes

If you are having problems compiling termios.cc than the most likely
reason is due to incompatibilities with the curses implementation on your
system. If this is the case than you can explicitly disable the curses
library with --disable-curses. By doing this you will lose the nice full
screen interface but hopefully you will be able to at least get Aspell to
compile correctly.

If the curses library is installed in a non-standard location than you can
specify the library and include directory with --enable-curses=«lib» and
--enable-curses-include=«dir». Lib can either be the complete path of the
library (for example "/usr/local/curses/libcurses.a"), the name of the
library (for example "ncurses") or a combined location and library in
the form "-L«lib dir» -l«lib»" (for example "-L/usr/local/ncurses/lib
-lncurses"). Dir is the location of the curses header files (for example
"/usr/local/ncurses/include").

2.5.4 Upgrading from Aspell .33/Pspell .12

Aspell has undergone an extremely large number of changes since the
previous Aspell/Pspell release. For one thing Pspell has been merged with
Aspell so there in no longer two separate libraries you have to worry
about.

Because of the massive changes between Aspell/Pspell and Aspell 0.50 you
may want to clean out the old files before installing the the new Aspell.
To do so do a "make uninstall" in the original Aspell and Pspell source
directories.

The way dictionaries are handled has also changed. This includes a change
in the naming conventions of both language names and dictionaries. Due to
the language name change, your old personal dictionaries will not be
recognized. However, you can import the old dictionaries by running the
"aspell-import" script. This also means that dictionaries designed to
work with older versions of Aspell are not likely to function correctly.
Fortunately new dictionary packages are available for most languages. You
can find them off of the Aspell home page at http://aspell.net.

The Pspell ABI is now part of Aspell except that the name of everything
has changed due to the renaming of Pspell to Aspell. In particular please
note the following name changes:

    pspell -> aspell
    manager -> speller
    emulation -> enumeration
    master_word_list -> main_word_list

Please also note that the name of the language-tag option has changed to 
lang. However, for backward compatible the language-tag option will still
work.

However, you should also be able to build applications that require Pspell
with the new Aspell as a backward compatibility header file is provided.

Due to a change in the way dictionaries are handled, scanning for .pwli
files in order to get find out which dictionaries are available will no
longer work. This means that programs that relied on this technique may
have problems finding dictionaries. Fortunately, GNU Aspell now provided a
uniform way to list all installed dictionaries via the C API. See the file
"list-dicts.c" in the examples/ directory for an example of how to due
this. Unfortunately there is isn't any simply way to find out which
dictionaries are installed which will work with both the old Aspell/Pspell
and the new GNU Aspell.

2.5.5 Upgrading from a pre-release snapshot

At the last minute I decided to merge the "speller-util" program into
the main "aspell" program. You may right to remove that speller-util
program to avoid confusion. This also means that dictionaries designed to
work with the snapshot will no longer work with the official release.

2.5.6 Win32 Notes

2.5.6.1 Getting

The latest version of the native Aspell/Win32 port can be found at http://
aspell.net/win32.

2.5.6.2 Building

There are two basically different ways of building ASpell using GCC for
Win32: You can either use the Cygwin compiler, which will produce binaries
that depend on the posix layer in cygwin1.dll. The other way is using
MinGW GCC, those binaries use the native C runtime from Microsoft
(MSVCRT.DLL). If you intend to use or link against the Aspell libraries
using a native Win32 compiler (e.g. MS Visual C++), you will need the
MinGW built ones to avoid problems caused by the different runtime
libraries.

Building Aspell using Cygwin: This works exactly like on other posix
compatible systems using the "configure && make && make install" cycle.
Some versions of Cygwin GCC will fail to link, this is caused by an
incorrect libstdc++.la in the /lib directory. After removing or renaming
this file, the build progress should work (GCC-2.95 and GCC-3.x should
work).

Building Aspell using MinGW: To compile Aspell with the MinGW compiler,
you will need at least GCC-3.2 (as shipped with MinGW-2.0.3) and some GNU
tools like rm and cp. The origin of those tools doesn't matter, it has
shown to work with any tools from MinGW/MSys, Cygwin or Linux. To build
Aspell, move into the win32 subdirectory and type "make". You can enable
some additional build options by either commenting out the definitions at
the head of the Makefile or passing those values as environment variables
or at the make command line. Following options are supported:

DEBUGVERSION
    If set to "1", the binaries will include debugging information
    (resulting in a much bigger size).
CURSESDIR
    Enter the path to the pdcurses library here, in order to get a nicer
    console interface (see below).
MSVCLIB
    Enter the filename of MS lib.exe here, if you want to build libraries
    that can be imported from MS Visual C++.
WIN32_RELOCATABLE
    If set to "1", Aspell will detect the prefix from the path where the
    DLL resides (see below for further datails).
TARGET
    Sets a prefix to be used for cross compilation (e.g. "/usr/local/bin/
    i586-mingw32msvc-" to cross compile from linux).

There are also a MinGW compilers available for Cygwin and Linux, both
versions are able to compile Aspell using the prebuilt Makefile. While the
Cygwin port automatically detects the correct compiler, the Linux version
depends on setting the "TARGET" variable in the Makefile (or environment)
to the correct compiler prefix.

Other compilers may work. There is a patch for MS Visual C++ 6.0 available
at ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/aspell, but it needs a lot of changes to the
Aspell sources. It has also been reported that the Intel C++ compiler can
be used for compilation.

2.5.6.3 (PD)Curses

In order to get the nice full screen interface when spell checking files a
curses implementation that does not require Cygwin is required. The
PDCurses (http://pdcurses.sourceforge.net) implementation is known to
work, other implementations may work however they have not been tested.
See the previous section for information on specifying the location of the
curses library and include file.

Curses notes:

  * PDcurses built with MinGW needs to be compiled with -DPDC_STATIC_BUILD
    to avoid duplicate declaration of DllMain when compiling aspell.exe.
  * The curses enabled version can cause trouble in some shells (MSys
    rxvt, emacs) and will produce errors like "initscr() LINES=1 COLS=1:
    too small". Use a non-curses version for those purposes.

2.5.6.4 Directories

If Aspell is compiled with WIN32_RELOCATABLE=1, it can be run from any
directory: It will set «prefix» according to its install location
(assuming it resides in «prefix»\bin). Your personal wordlists will be
saved in the «prefix» directory with their names changed from ".aspell.
<lang>.*" to "<lang>.*" (you can override the path by setting the HOME
environment variable).

2.5.6.5 Installer

The installer registers the DLLs as shared libraries, you should increase
the reference counter to avoid the libraries being uninstalled if your
application still depends on them (and decrease it again when uninstalling
your program). The reference counters are located under:

HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\SharedDLLs

The install location and version numbers are stored under

HKLM\SOFTWARE\Aspell

2.5.6.6 Win32 consoles

The console uses a different encoding than GUI applications, changing this
to to a Windows encoding (e.g. 1252) is not supported on Win9x/Me. On
WinNT (and later) those codepages can be set by first changing the console
font to "lucida console", then changing the codepage using "chcp
1252".

Some alternative shells (e.g. MSys' rxvt or Cygwin's bash) do a codepage
conversion (if correctly set up), so running Aspell inside those shells
might be a workaround for Win9x.

2.6 Using aspell-import

The aspell-import Perl script will look for old personal dictionaries and
will import them into GNU Aspell. It will look for both Ispell and Aspell
ones. To use it just run it from the command prompt. If you get an error
about /usr/bin/perl not being found than instead try "perl «bindir»/
aspell-import". When running the script if you get a message like:

    Error: No word lists can be found for the language "de".

This means that you have not installed support for the given language, in
this case "de" for German. To rectify the situation download and install
a dictionary designed to work with GNU Aspell 0.50 or better.

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next up previous contents
Next: 3. Basic Usage Up: GNU Aspell 0.50.4.1 Previous: 1. Introduction   
Contents
Kevin Atkinson 2003-10-11
