[OS X Emacs] Check Spelling for English and Bulgarian in Aquamacs

[Win Treese]

Hi, Roussanka. The spelling system in Aquamacs can be a bit confusing, especially since it’s different from some other versions of Emacs on the Mac. Here’s an outline; feel free to ask about anything that doesn’t make sense.

A quick check: have you rebooted since uninstalling cocoAspell? Since it installs with a preference pane, it’s possible that a reboot would clean up some more after uninstalling it. If that works, great!

By default, Aquamacs uses the Mac OS spelling software, and it does so through the usual “ispell” interface code in Emacs. 

You can verify that you are using the Mac spelling system by looking at the value of ispell-program-name, which should be “NSSpellChecker”.  One way to see it through the menus is Edit->Spelling->Customize, and then looking for “Ispell Program Name” in the buffer that pops up.

From what you described, that may not be the problem. As far as I know, the cocoAspell distribution is a bit old, and may not work correctly on Catalina. A quick google search didn’t find anyone talking about that. The problem you mentioned was installing dictionaries, and it seems likely that Catalina made it harder to do things like that.

If rebooting doesn’t help, and Aquamacs is set properly, then you could try typing in TextEdit to see if you see the same problem with bad suggestions. If it also happens in TextEdit, it would seem that something in the system is corrupted, and it doesn’t have anything to do with Aquamacs. I’m not sure what to do in that case.

The languages use for the checking are set for the Mac (which then apply to Aquamacs) in the System Preferences->Keyboard->Text pane.

Finally, you could install the command line aspell program with Homebrew, and then customize ispell-program-name to use that.

- Win








> On Jul 12, 2020, at 8:25 PM, Roussanka Loukanova <rl.stpuu at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Dear Win, Dear All,
> 
> I hope you can help me to fix the Check Spelling in Aquamacs. Up to recent, it used to work excellently for English: with LaTeX, in plain text (.txt files), with html. I think I had it with Aspell, or with what it was by downloading and installing Aquamacs. I only set Fly mode, and few other things.  
> 
> I'm with:
> 
> MacBook Air, 13" (2017)
> macOS Catalina, v.10.15.5
> 
> Aquamacs 3.5
> 
> The spell checking in Aquamacs has become messed up, i.e., worsened, after my attempts to get spelling for Bulgarian and Swedish, and in particular, by attempts to get that by cocoAspell.
> 
> I downloaded, unpacked, and installed cocoAspell (by giving it permissions). But then the Spelling pane in System Preferences couldn't install any dictionaries, not even for English. I uninstalled cocoAspell, by the instructions on its website. After that Spell Checking has worsened in Aquamacs.
> 
> Now, by random tests, I get misspelled words, underlined as misspelled, but with inappropriate suggestions, or without any choices. E.g., for "unsucsessful", with "Esc-$", the list of offered corrections is empty. I only get "C-h or ? for more options: ..."
> 
> Before these attempts, I used to get good optional choices for misspelled words of English, with Fly Spell.
> 
> Now, my questions are:
> 
> (1) How to fix the spell checking for English?
> Perhaps Aquamacs came with GNU Aspell, and now it's with something else. The dictionary for EN is STANDARD:
> Edit > Spelling > Customize...
> Subgroups: FliSpell
> Flyspell Default Dictionary: Value Menu Default
>     State : STANDARD.
> 
> (2) How to get Spell Checking for Bulgarian in Aquamacs?
> 
> Here is what I've tried, without cocoAspell:
> 
> I downloaded aspell6-bg-4.1-0.tar.bz2 from:
> https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/aspell/dict/0index.html
> 
> I unzipped and tried installation of the dictionary (aspell6-bg-4.1-0) from the Terminal:
> 
> - by instructions inside aspell6-bg-4.1-0/README:
> 
> $ ./configure   
> Finding Dictionary file location ... /usr/local/lib/aspell-0.60
> Finding Data file location ... /usr/local/lib/aspell-0.60
> 
> After that, I get the following error, which I do not know how to fix:
> 
> $ make
> xcrun: error: invalid active developer path (/Library/Developer/CommandLineTools), missing xcrun at: /Library/Developer/CommandLineTools/usr/bin/xcrun
> 
> Spell Checking and Grammar works in some of the applications:
> 
> - Gmail (I'm especially pleased, as of now)
> - MS Word: even if I have very limited experence  with MS, I could easily check the Help menue how to do it.
> 
> (3) After I fix (1)-(2), I would like to have Aquamacs with spell checking Swedish (Svenska).
> 
> Best Regards,
> Roussanka
> 
> 
> 
> _____________________________________________________________
> MacOSX-Emacs mailing list
> MacOSX-Emacs at email.esm.psu.edu
> https://email.esm.psu.edu/mailman/listinfo/macosx-emacs
> List Archives: http://dir.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.macintosh.osx