Svend Tollak Munkejord
Today, Mark Gray
wrote: [snip] (append-ispell-dict-alist "british.hash" ("british" "[A-Za-z]" "[^A-Za-z]" "[']" nil ("-B" "-d" "british") nil iso-8859-1))
That did the trick, thanks a lot! (But there should be single quote at the start of the second line.)
Bad job of cutting and pasting -- my apologies if it cost you any time.
;; note the iso-8859-1 addition -- it should probably also be added to ;; the Norwegian one (as a guess)
You are right -- in fact it was there already. I was so focused on the \305\306\310... stuff that I did not notice.
I am still puzzled by the fact that it did not seem necessary to specify iso-8859-1 in the case when Emacs was started with the --no-site-file flag.
In that case the default comes from /usr/share/emacs/21.2/lisp/textmodes/ispell.el (on 8.1) instead of being built up using append-ispell-dict-alist in the british.el file.
Is there a setting I can make in .emacs so that I will not have to remember to edit british.el the next time I upgrade SuSE Linux?
You could report it as a bug to SuSE, since they still have it wrong in 8.1 (but since they support so many other languages using different character sets it is possible that they do not have an easy solution.) You could dig deeper into emacs and make it default to iso-8859-1 if it is nil, either by redefining a variable or a defun inside your .emacs . You could setq ispell-dict-alist directly as it is now in your running emacs (do an ispell first to load ispell). This would override the append-ispell-dict-alist's that the british.el and Norwegian version (and other "language.el's") perform to create ispell-dict-alist, but that is just as likely to cause you problems if emacs or ispell change in the next upgrade. One of the reasons I like SuSE is that they go to such extreme lengths customizing things. Their taste in configuration clashes horribly with my own in several places, but I always find it instructional to do a clean install and go through fixing things back the way I like them, just in case they have broken new ground with their .emacs or other configuration files.