[Tip] Localizing Emacs spell-checking in Pardus

[Mourningdove]

I installed Emacs from the repository shortly after first installing Pardus. It's version 23, which GNU is not recommending for production use yet, but for my everyday work it seems fine.

I had one problem: I couldn't get aspell to work with it. I was able to track down the reason and thought I'd share it. There is some code in a file called site-start.el that localizes Emacs for the Turkish language and links the spell checker to zpspell.

If Turkish is not your native language, at the command prompt, go to the directory

Code:

/usr/share/emacs/23.0.60/site-lisp

The directory contains four files:

Code:

site-start.el
site-start.elc
subdirs.el
subdirs.elc

As su, edit the file site-start.el. Look for the lines

Code:

;; for zpspell
(setq ispell-program-name "zpspell")
(setq ispell-local-dictionary-alist
             `((nil
             "[A-ZŞĞIa-zşğı]"
             "[^A-ZŞĞIa-zşğı]"
             "[']" nil ("") "~utf-8" utf-8)))

Comment those lines out. They override your system default spell-checker and cause Emacs to use the Turkish spell-checker that is included in every install of Pardus.

Delete the file site-start.elc. (You have to be su to do that.) That file is a compiled version of site-start.el, and it is the one that Emacs reads on startup if it is present.

Optionally, you can compile the new site-start.el if you're good at such things, but you don't have to. You might find a slight increase in startup time if you're using an older computer. I didn't recompile the file and I don't notice any difference.

Hope this helps somebody.