Welcome to the first prerelease of the Spanish support for ispell!

This is under development and is not considered ready for general use.
However, many people have shown interest in early access to this, so
here it is.  Otherwise, there was a serious risk of duplication of
effort.

If you are not fluent in Spanish and know well the rules, this may not
be for you yet.  Actually, this is meant for people in a desperate
enough situation or that are willing to help in finding roots worth
including in the dictionary.

The language name is castellano (Castilian).  This has the advantage
that it can be properly spelled in ASCII.  Castilian is the original
name of Spanish (it was the language of Castile).  In Spanish,
castellano is used in preference to espa~nol by many people,
especially those that live in Spain but have other mother tongues,
such as Catalan, Galician or Basque.  I personally use both names,
with a preference for castellano.  In America, I understand espa~nol
is preferred.  Both are correct names in Spanish for the Spanish
language.

WARNING: Many changes to this are expected.  In particular, try to
avoid running munchlist on your private word lists because the flag
definitions will change.  If you want to do it anyway, read the
munchlist documentation carefully.

The current version of the dictionary contains over 88000 words.
However, these words are just variations on about 6600 roots.  And
when I say roots here I mean as defined by the affix rules.  In a
language sense, they are still less roots.

So the dictionary is currently very limited.  Moreover, the selection
of words is rather arbitrary and inconsistent.

Also, for technical reasons, when checking a word that does not exist
in the dictionary, ispell will freeze for several seconds to compute
alternative words.  The duration of this varies a lot and depends on
the word length and the final letter in the word.  This is a result of
the combined effect of the algorithms used in ispell and the
complexity of the affix file castellano.aff.
 
This dictionary requires more than 26 flags.  It currently needs an
ispell compiled for at least 52 (you do this specifying 64 as the
value for MASKBITS).

To unpack:

	cd ispell-directory/languages
	gzip -dc castellano.tar.gz | tar xvfB -

The easiest way to build the dictionary is through the Makefile
provided by ispell, but provided you already have an appropriate
ispell, there are shortcuts that can be learned by reading the
provided languages/castellano/Makefile

If this is the first time you build the dictionary, it is probably
better to do it while building ispell.  This is a fragment from my
local.h:

#undef NO8BIT		/* Remove this for non-English installations */
#define LANGUAGES "{english,MASTERDICTS=english.med+,HASHFILES=med+.hash,VARIANTS=british,EXTRADICT=/usr/dict/words} {castellano}"
#define MASTERHASH	"med+.hash"

#define MASKBITS 64

Before using the dictionary do:

	touch ~/.ispell_castellano

Otherwise, words added to your private dictionary will end up in your
English private dictionary.

To use it:

	ispell -d castellano -T type file

Where file is one of:

	list	Accents are entered as in a', e', i'.  This is the default
		and how the dictionaries are encoded.  I have no other use
		for it.

	tex	As specified by spanish.sty

	ftc	It should be as in ftc, but there are errors in it.

	plaintex	As in TeX (more or less)

	latin1	ISO 8859/1 (this is the one I use most).

There are commented out forms for troff, but I don't use it and I
don't know how to do them.  Since I only use latin1 and tex, fixes to
the others or addons are welcome.

To use this dictionary with emacs, you must add new definitions to the
Emacs lisp variable ispell-dictionary-alist.  To achieve this, you can
try the provided ispell.el.patch, either with Larry Wall's patch or by
hand.

However, I have seen that in recent versions of emacs on some
machines, changing ispell.el does not produce any visible effect.
This is because ispell.el was loaded while creating the emacs
executable.  The only solution I have found is to add this to your
.emacs file:

;;; Adding Spanish dictionaries to ispell.  Someday this will
;;;  not be needed.
(setq castellano-entries
      '(("castellano"                      ; Spanish mode
         "[A-Z\301\311\315\323\332\334\321a-z\341\351\355\363\372\374\361]"
         "[^A-Z\301\311\315\323\332\334\321a-z\341\351\355\363\372\374\361]"
         "[---]" nil ("-B") "~tex")
        ("castellano8"                      ; 8 bit spanish mode
         "[A-Z\301\311\315\323\332\334\321a-z\341\351\355\363\372\374\361]"
         "[^A-Z\301\311\315\323\332\334\321a-z\341\351\355\363\372\374\361]"
         "[---]" nil ("-B" "-d" "castellano") "~latin1")))

(setq ispell-dictionary-alist
      (append
       ispell-dictionary-alist
       castellano-entries))

;;; The following magically updates the menu. Don't ask.
(ispell-change-dictionary nil)

Since I don't really know Emacs lisp, please be kind to me if this
looks too clumsy.

Enjoy.

Julio S'anchez (jsanchez@gmv.es)