Since upgrading to rawhide, I can't convince aspell to work properly rather than in dumbed-down 'strip-accents' mode. It doesn't like the option in /etc/aspell.conf which used to make it work correctly: hades /home/dwmw2 $ aspell -a Error: /etc/aspell.conf:1: The key "strip-accents" is unknown.
When I say 'correctly', I mean I expect it to accept correct spellings of words with accents. And I expect it to _correct_ me if I accidentally miss an accent. This shows it misbehaving. It says 'no, yes, no' and gets it wrong in all three cases: @(#) International Ispell Version 3.1.20 (but really Aspell 0.60.3) rôle & rôle 35 0: role, Roley, rile, Rolfe, roles, tole, roe, Ole, ole, roll, rule, prole, Rolf, roue, Cole, Dole, Pole, Rome, Rose, Rowe, Roze, bole, dole, hole, mole, pole, robe, rode, rope, rose, rote, rove, sole, vole, role's role * café & café 21 0: cafe, cafes, Cage, cage, chafe, caff, cave, CARE, Cale, Care, Case, Cate, Caye, Rafe, cake, came, cane, cape, care, case, safe
The strip-accents option is not supported in the last version of aspell (see /usr/share/doc/aspell-0.60.3/README). From the version 0.60 there have been separated world lists with and without accents (aspell uses world lists without accents implicitly). The spell checking for text with accents should be done by set master option to "world_list_with_accents" now. There was a misstake in aspell man page - option strip-accents was mentioned there. It is fixed from aspell-0.60.3-4.
Thanks, I'll try that. Actually, I believe that the with-accents dictionary ought to be the _default_ now that we handle UTF-8 everywhere. The old excuse that keyboards and typewriters can't handle accents is no longer valid. Admittedly, there are people who _deliberately_ want to stick to ASCII, but in general those are the people who can't be bothered to pay any attention to the results of aspell anyway. If people are actually bothering to run a spell-checker, or to pay any attention to the results which an automatic spell-checker offers, then it's reasonable to assume that they do actually care about being correct. They're probably omitting the accents just because they don't know how to enter them, and a spell-checker's auto-replace functionality could be very useful to them.
*** Bug 183204 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***