🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <UMERIN.93Jun4191040@orchid.mse.kyutech.ac.jp>
umerin@mse.kyutech.ac.jp writes:

> I don't know your ispell can correct Japanese.  If your ispell does
> not take account of any asian character sets, the term international
> or world is a bad idea.  I recommend espell, "european ispell" or
> something like that.

I need somebody who knows Asian languages to help me here.  My
understanding was that the Asian languages have two different writing
systems, one orthographic (letters) and one ideographic or
pictographic.  I also understood that a spelling checker doesn't make
sense for an ideographic writing system, since every symbol is a legal
word standing alone.

Ispell can easily spell-check any language which can be written with
an 8-bit character set, including handling small numbers of special
symbols that are written with multiple characters (such as the TeX
encoding of German umlauts).  I believe that this includes Japanese
when written orthographically.  (Hiragana?)  Ispell *cannot* currently
handle 16-bit or larger characters.  This was a design decision, based
on the assumptions I list in the paragraph above.  If my assumptions
are incorrect, it would not be tremendously difficult to change ispell
to handle a wider character set (it can already use 16-bit characters
internally).

I would appreciate learning more about this issue.
-- 
	Geoff Kuenning	geoff@maui.cs.ucla.edu	geoff@ITcorp.com