How to get ispell on your Mac
Document Actions
Ispell is a spell checker that works well with Emacs (and Aquamacs). On any Mac with OS X you can download, compile, and install it without any problems. However, if you want support for Norwegian this might be a little bit more difficult (compund words in Norwegian is the source of some of the difficulties). Rune Kleveland has made the life of Norwegian ispell users a lot easier with his Norwegian ispell-dictionary. His work is not completly up to date with the latest version of ispell, and in the make file he has created he use tools that are not available/compatible on your Mac. On my PowerBook I managed to make this work by installing Gnu awk, the unsq program (I do not remember where I found the source, but the compiled binary is available here – it is compiled on the PowerBook but it will run under the Intel based MacBook) and tweaking his patches. I tried to do the same on the MacBook Pro, but for some reason the creation of the Norwegian dictionary failed. I could have looked into this problem, but then I remembered that i still had the Norwegian dictionary files generated on my PowerBook. I copied them over to the MacBook Pro and did another make all. It worked. To make life easier for you I have made available this patched distribution (approx 11 MByte) of ispell 3.3.02 with ispell-norsk 2.0 included and the Norwegian dictionary files generated. Download it, upack it and follow these steps:
cd ispell-3.3.02.no make all sudo make installThis works well on my MacBook Pro, but I think it should also work on PowerBooks with Mac OS X and other Macs.
Update: In Emacs i use flyspell, and then this trick is nice (from Customize Aquamacs):
Flyspell has a surprisingly underutilized function called flyspell-check-previous-highlighted-word . Imagine that you’re typing a long sentence and, oops, flyspell gives you the red-line for misspelling a word, but you don’t want to interupt your thought to fix it right now. Most people would mouse over to the misspell once they've finished the sentence. How MS Word! Instead, call flyspell-check-previous-highlighted-word, and a list of suggestions will appear on the top of the screen, pick one, and then continue right from where you left off. I have mine bound to "C-c j" in my .emacs:
(global-set-key (kbd "C-c j") ‘flyspell-check-previous-highlighted-word)
March 17 2006 (aa)
