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.\" -*- Mode:Text -*-
.\"
.TH ISPELL local MIT
.SH NAME
ispell \- Correct spelling for a file
.br
munchlist \- Combine suffixes in a spelling list
.SH SYNOPSIS
.B ispell
[
.B \-x
|
.B \-d
file |
.B \-p
file |
.B \-w
chars ] file .....
.br
.B ispell
[
.B \-d
file |
.B \-p
file |
.B \-w
chars ]
.B \-l
.br
.B ispell
[
.B \-d
file |
.B \-p
file
]
.B \-a
.br
.B ispell
[
.B \-d
file |
.B \-p
file |
.B \-w
chars ]
.B \-c
.br
.B munchlist
[
.B \-d
file |
.B \-e
|
.B \-w
chars ]
[ files ]
.SH DESCRIPTION
.PP
.I Ispell
is fashioned after the
.I spell
program from ITS (called
.I ispell
on Twenex systems.)  The most common usage is "ispell filename".  In this
case,
.I ispell
will display each word which does not appear in the dictionary, and
allow you to change it.  If there are "near misses" in the dictionary
(words which differ by only a single letter, a missing or extra letter,
or a pair of transposed letters), then they are also displayed.  If you
think the word is correct as it stands, you can type either "Space" to
accept it this one time, or "I" to accept it and put it in your private
dictionary.  If one of the near misses is the word you want, type the
corresponding number.  Finally, if none of these choices is right, you
can type "R" and you will be prompted for a replacement word.
If you want to see a list of words that might be close using wildcard
characters, type "L" to lookup a word in the system dictionary.
.PP
When a misspelled word is found, it is printed at the top of the screen.
Any near misses will be printed on the following lines, and finally, two
lines containing the word are printed at the bottom of the screen.  If
your terminal can type in reverse video, the word itself is highlighted.
.PP
The
.B \-l
or "list" option to
.I ispell
is used to produce a list of misspelled words from the standard input.
.PP
The
.B \-a
is intended to be used from other programs through a pipe.  In this
mode,
.I ispell
expects the standard input to consist of single words.  Each word is
read, and a single line is written to the standard output.  If the word
was found in the main dictionary, or your personal dictionary, then the
line contains only a '*'.  If the word was found through suffix removal,
then the line contains a '+', a space, and the root word.  If the word
is not in the dictionary, but there are near misses, then the line
contains an '&', a space, and a list of the near misses separated by
spaces.  Also, each near miss is capitalized the same as the input
words.  Finally, if the word neither appears in the dictionary, and
there are no near misses, then the line contains only a '#'.  This mode
is also suitable for interactive use when you want to figure out the
spelling of a single word.  (These characters are the same as the codes
that the real spell program uses.)
.PP
The
.B \-x
option causes
.I ispell
to remove the .bak file that it normally leaves.  The .bak file contains
the pre-corrected text.  If there are file opening / writing errors,
the .bak file may be left for recovery purposes even with the -x option.
.PP
The
.B \-d
option is used to specify an alternate hashed dictionary file,
other than the default.  If the filename does not begin with a "/",
the library directory for the default dictionary file is prefixed.
This is useful to allow dictionaries which prefer alternate british
spellings ("centre", "tyre", etc), or add lists of special-purpose
jargon and acronyms for subclasses of documents.  There are some shortcomings
in attempting to provide foreign-language dictionaries, but something
like "-dfrench" could be made to work somewhat.
The
.B \-d
option may specify
.IR /dev/null ,
in which case the dictionary is limited to the personal one.
This may be useful for certain private dictionaries.
.PP
The
.B \-p
option is used to specify an alternate personal dictionary file.
If the file name does not begin with "/", $HOME is prefixed.  Also, the
shell variable WORDLIST may be set, which renames the personal dictionary
in the same manner.  The command line overrides WORDLIST setting.  If
neither is present "ispell.words" is used.
.PP
The
.B \-w
option may be used to specify characters other than alphabetics
which may also appear in words.  For instance,
.B \-w
"&" will allow "AT&T"
to be picked up.  Underscores are useful in many technical documents.
There is an admittedly crude provision in this option for 8-bit international
characters.  If "n" appears in the character string, the three characters
following are a DECIMAL code 0 - 255, for the character.  There must be
three decimal characters in all cases, so you have to prepend with 0's,
for instance, to include bells and formfeeds in your words (an admittedly
silly thing to do, but aren't most pedagogical examples):
.PP
n007n012
.PP
Numeric digits other than the three following "n" are simply numeric
characters.  Use of "n" does not conflict with anything because actual
alphabetics have no meaning - alphabetics are already accepted.
.I Ispell
will typically be used with input from a file, meaning that preserving
parity for possible 8 bit characters from the input text is OK.  If you
specify the -l option, and actually type text from the terminal, this may
create problems if your stty settings preserve parity.
.PP
The
.B \-c
option is primarily intended for use by the
.I munchlist
shell script.
In this mode, a list of words is read from the standard input.
For each word, a list of possible root words and suffixes will be
written to the standard output.
Some of the root words will be illegal and must be filtered from the
output by other means;
the
.I munchlist
script does this.
As an example, the command "echo BOTHER | ispell -c" produces:
.PP
.RS
.nf
BOTH
BOTHE/R
BOTH/R
.fi
.RE
.PP
The
.I munchlist
shell script is used to reduce the size of dictionary files,
primarily personal dictionary files.
It is also capable of combining dictionaries from various sources.
The given
.I files
are read (standard input if no arguments are given),
reduced to a minimal set of roots and suffixes that will match the
same list of words, and written to standard output.
.PP
Normally, words that are in the default dictionary are removed by
.I munchlist
during processing.
If the list is to be used with a different dictionary, the
.B \-d
option can be used to specify an alternate (hashed) dictionary file
containing words to be removed from the output list.
If a dictionary file of
.I /dev/null
is specified, no words will be removed from the output;
this is useful when munching the primary dictionary file.
.PP
The
.B \-w
option is passed on to
.IR ispell .
The
.B \-e
("efficient") option causes the script to use a slower algorithm that uses
somewhat less space in TMPDIR (normally
.IR /usr/tmp ")."
.PP
It is possible to install
.I ispell
in such a way as to only support ASCII range text if desired.
.SH DEFAULT FILES
/usr/public/lib/ispell.hash
.br
/usr/dict/web2		for the Lookup function
.br
$HOME/ispell.words	user's private dictionary
.br
/usr/public/lib/expand[12].sed		sed scripts for expanding suffixes
.SH SEE ALSO
spell(1), egrep(1), look(1)
.SH BUGS
It takes about five seconds for
.I ispell
to read in the hash table.
.sp
Perhaps more than ten choices should be allowed for near misses.
.sp
The hash table is stored as a quarter-megabyte array, so a PDP-11
version does not seem likely.
.sp
.I Ispell
should understand more
.I troff
syntax, and deal more intelligently with contractions.
.sp
While alternate dictionaries for foreign languages could be defined, and
the international characters included in words, rules concerning
word endings / pluralization accommodate english only.
.sp
.I Munchlist
is very slow, and requires tremendous amounts of temporary file space for
large dictionaries.
It does respect the TMPDIR environment variable, so this space can be
redirected.
However, a lot of the temporary space it needs is for sorting, so TMPDIR
is only a partial help on systems with an uncooperative
.IR sort (1).
As a benchmark, the 15000-word
.I dict.191
takes about 1200 blocks in TMPDIR, and 2000 in
.IR sort "'s"
temporary directories.
On a 68000 workstation, it runs for the better part of an hour.
Munching
.I dict.191
with
.I /usr/dict/words
(28000 words output)
took another 1500 blocks or so, and ran for about three hours.
.SH AUTHOR
Pace Willisson (pace@mit-vax)
.br
Enhanced by James Woods, Bob McQueer, Bill Randle, Marc Ries, Rob McMahon,
and Geoff Kuenning.
DataMuseum.dk

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