*spell.txt* For Vim version 7.0aa. Last change: 2005 Apr 15 VIM REFERENCE MANUAL by Bram Moolenaar Spell checking *spell* 1. Quick start |spell-quickstart| 2. Generating a spell file |spell-mkspell| 9. Spell file format |spell-file-format| {Vi does not have any of these commands} Spell checking is not available when the |+syntax| feature has been disabled at compile time. ============================================================================== 1. Quick start *spell-quickstart* This command switches on spell checking: > :setlocal spell spelllang=en_us This switches on the 'spell' option and specifies to check for US English. The words that are not recognized are highlighted with one of these: SpellBad word not recognized SpellRare rare word SpellLocal wrong spelling for selected region Vim only checks words for spelling, there is no grammar check. To search for the next misspelled word: *]s* *E756* ]s Move to next misspelled word after the cursor. *[s* [s Move to next misspelled word before the cursor. DOESN'T WORK YET! PERFORMANCE Note that Vim does on-the-fly spellchecking. To make this work fast the word list is loaded in memory. Thus this uses a lot of memory (1 Mbyte or more). There might also be a noticable delay when the word list is loaded, which happens when 'spelllang' is set. Each word list is only loaded once, they are not deleted when 'spelllang' is made empty. When 'encoding' is set the word lists are reloaded, thus you may notice a delay then too. REGIONS A word may be spelled differently in various regions. For example, English comes in (at least) these variants: en all regions en_us US en_gb Great Britain en_ca Canada Words that are not used in one region but are used in another region are highlighted with SpellLocal. Always use lowercase letters for the language and region names. SPELL FILES Vim searches for spell files in the "spell" subdirectory of the directories in 'runtimepath'. The name is: LL-XXX.EEE.spl, where: LL the language name -XXX optional addition EEE the value of 'encoding' Exception: Vim uses "latin1" when 'encoding' is "iso-8859-15". The euro sign doesn't matter for spelling. Spelling for EBCDIC is currently not supported. A spell file might not be available in the current 'encoding'. See |spell-mkspell| about how to create a spell file. Converting a spell file with "iconv" will NOT work. If a spell file only uses ASCII characters the encoding can be omitted. This is useful for English: "en.spl" The file with encoding is checked first, thus you could have one with encoding that includes words with non-ASCII characters and use the ASCII file as a fall-back. *E758* *E759* When loading a spell file Vim checks that it is properly formatted. If you get an error the file may be truncated, modified or for another Vim version. WORDS Vim uses a fixed method to recognize a word. This is independent of 'iskeyword', so that it also works in help files and for languages that include characters like '-' in 'iskeyword'. The word characters do depend on 'encoding'. A word that starts with a digit is always ignored. SYNTAX HIGHLIGHTING Files that use syntax highlighting can specify where spell checking should be done: everywhere default in specific items use "contains=@Spell" everywhere but specific items use "contains=@NoSpell" Note that mixing @Spell and @NoSpell doesn't make sense. ============================================================================== 2. Generating a spell file *spell-mkspell* Vim uses a binary file format for spelling. This greatly speeds up loading the word list and keeps it small. You can create a Vim spell file from the .aff and .dic files that Myspell uses. Myspell is used by OpenOffice.org and Mozilla. You should be able to find them here: http://lingucomponent.openoffice.org/spell_dic.html :mksp[ell] {outname} {inname} ... *:mksp* *:mkspell* Generate spell file {outname}.spl from Myspell files {inname}.aff and {inname}.dic. Multiple {inname} arguments can be given to combine regions into one Vim spell file. Example: > :mkspell ~/.vim/spell/en /tmp/en_US /tmp/en_CA /tmp/en_AU < This combines the English word lists for US, CA and AU into one en.spl file. Up to eight regions can be combined. *E754* *755* Since you might want to change the word list for use with Vim the following procedure is recommended: 1. Obtain the xx_YY.aff and xx_YY.dic files from Myspell. 2. Make a copy of these files to xx_YY.orig.aff and xx_YY.orig.dic. 3. Change the xx_YY.aff and xx_YY.dic files to remove bad words, add missing words, etc. 4. Use |:mkspell| to generate the Vim spell file and try it out. When the Myspell files are updated you can merge the differences: 5. Obtain the new Myspell files as xx_YY.new.aff and xx_UU.new.dic. 6. Use Vimdiff to see what changed: > vimdiff xx_YY.orig.dic xx_YY.new.dic 7. Take over the changes you like in xx_YY.dic. You may also need to change xx_YY.aff. 8. Rename xx_YY.new.dic to xx_YY.orig.dic and xx_YY.new.aff to xx_YY.new.aff. ============================================================================== 9. Spell file format *spell-file-format* This is the format of the files that are used by the person who creates and maintains a word list. Note that we avoid the word "dictionary" here. That is because the goal of spell checking differs from writing a dictionary (as in the book). For spelling we need a list of words that are OK, thus need not to be highlighted. Names will not appear in a dictionary, but do appear in a word list. And some old words are rarely used and are common misspellings. These do appear in a dictionary but not in a word list. There are two files: the basic word list and an affix file. The affixes are used to modify the basic words to get the full word list. This significantly reduces the number of words, especially for a language like Polish. This is called affix compression. The format for the affix and word list files is mostly identical to what Myspell uses (the spell checker of Mozilla and OpenOffice.org). A description can be found here: http://lingucomponent.openoffice.org/affix.readme ~ Note that affixes are case sensitive, this isn't obvious from the description. Vim supports a few extras. Hopefully Myspell will support these too some day. See |spell-affix-vim|. The basic word list and the affix file are combined and turned into a binary spell file. All the preprocessing has been done, thus this file loads fast. The binary spell file format is described in the source code (src/spell.c). But only developers need to know about it. The preprocessing also allows us to take the Myspell language files and modify them before the Vim word list is made. The tools for this can be found in the "src/spell" directory. WORD LIST FORMAT *spell-wordlist-format* A very short example, with line numbers: 1 1234 2 aan 3 Als 4 Etten-Leur 5 et al. 6 's-Gravenhage 7 's-Gravenhaags 8 bedel/P 9 kado/1 10 cadeau/2 The first line contains the number of words. Vim ignores it. *E760* What follows is one word per line. There should be no white space after the word. When the word only has lower-case letters it will also match with the word starting with an upper-case letter. When the word includes an upper-case letter, this means the upper-case letter is required at this position. The same word with a lower-case letter at this position will not match. When some of the other letters are upper-case it will not match either. The same word with all upper-case characters will always be OK. word list matches does not match ~ als als Als ALS ALs AlS aLs aLS Als Als ALS als ALs AlS aLs aLS ALS ALS als Als ALs AlS aLs aLS AlS AlS ALS als Als ALs aLs aLS Note in line 5 to 7 that non-word characters are used. You can include any character in a word. When checking the text a word still only matches when it appears with a non-word character before and after it. For Myspell a word starting with a non-word character probably won't work. After the word there is an optional slash and flags. Most of these flags are letters that indicate the affixes that can be used with this word. *spell-affix-vim* A flag that Vim adds and is not in Myspell is the "=" flag. This has the meaning that case matters. This can be used if the word does not have the first letter in upper case at the start of a sentence. Example: word list matches does not match ~ 's morgens/= 's morgens 'S morgens 's Morgens 's Morgens 's Morgens 'S morgens 's morgens *spell-affix-mbyte* The basic word list is normally in an 8-bit encoding, which is mentioned in the affix file. The affix file must always be in the same encoding as the word list. This is compatible with Myspell. For Vim the encoding may also be something else, any encoding that "iconv" supports. The "SET" line must specify the name of the encoding. When using a multi-byte encoding it's possible to use more different affixes. Performance hint: Although using affixes reduces the number of words, it reduces the speed. It's a good idea to put all the often used words in the word list with the affixes prepended/appended. vim:tw=78:sw=4:ts=8:ft=help:norl: