The spell files included here are in Vim's special format. You can't edit them. See ":help spell" for more information. COPYRIGHT The files used as input for the spell files come from the OpenOffice.org spell files. Most of them go under the LGPL or a similar license. Copyright notices for specific languages are in README_??.txt. Note that the files for different regions are merged, both to save space and to make it possible to highlight words for another region different from bad words. Most of the soundslike mappings come from Aspell ??_phonet.dat files: ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/aspell/dict/. Most go under the GPL or LGPL copyright. GENERATING .SPL FILES This involves downloading the files from the OpenOffice.org server, applying a patch and running Vim to generate the .spl file. To do this all in one go use the Aap program (www.a-a-p.org). It's simple to install, it only requires Python. You can also do it manually: 1. Fetch the right spell file from: http://ftp.services.openoffice.org/pub/OpenOffice.org/contrib/dictionaries 2. Unzip the archive: unzip LL_RR.zip 3. Apply the patch: patch < LL_RR.diff 4. If the language has multiple regions do the above for each region. E.g., for English there are five regions: US, CA, AU, NZ and GB. 5. Run Vim and execute ":mkspell". Make sure you do this with the correct locale, that influences the upper/lower case letters and word characters. On Unix it's something like: env LANG=en_US.UTF-8 vim mkspell! en en_US en_AU en_CA en_GB en_NZ 6. Repeat step 5 for other locales. For English you could generate a spell file for latin1, utf-8 and ASCII. ASCII only makes sense for languages that have very few words with non-ASCII letters. Now you understand why I prefer using the Aap recipe :-). MAINTAINING A LANGUAGE Every language should have a maintainer. His tasks are to track the changes in the OpenOffice.org spell files and make updated patches. Words that haven't been added/removed from the OpenOffice lists can also be handled by the patches. It is important to keep the version of the .dic and .aff files that you started with. When OpenOffice brings out new versions of these files you can find out what changed and take over these changes in your patch. When there are very many changes you can do it the other way around: re-apply the changes for Vim to the new versions of the .dic and .aff files. This procedure should work well: 1. Obtain the zip archive with the .aff and .dic files. Unpack it as explained above and copy (don't rename!) the .aff and .dic files to .orig.aff and .orig.dic. Using the Aap recipe should work, it will make the copies for you. 2. Tweak the .aff and .dic files to generate the perfect .spl file. Don't change too much, the OpenOffice people are not stupid. However, you may want to remove obvious mistakes. And remove single-letter words that aren't really words, they mess up the suggestions (English has this problem). You can use the "fixdup" Vim script to find duplicate words. 3. Make the diff file. "aap diff" will do this for you. If a diff would be too big you might consider writing a Vim script to do systematic changes. Do check that someone else can reproduce building the spell file. Send the result to Bram for inclusion in the distribution. Bram will generate the .spl file and upload it to the ftp server (if he can't generate it you will have to send him the .spl file too). 4. When OpenOffice makes a new zip file available you need to update the patch. "aap check" should do most of the work for you: if there are changes the .new.dic and .new.aff files will appear. You can now figure out the differences with .orig.dic and .orig.aff, adjust the .dic and .aff files and finally move the .new.dic to .orig.dic and .new.aff to .orig.aff. 5. Repeat step 4. regularly.