On Thu, Aug 27, 2009 at 5:49 PM, Joachim Osnabryg <o...@jpberlin.de> wrote:
> > => Has anyone installed Aspell or CocoAspell under Mac-OSX and has got them > working with LyX in a reasonable manner? > Would you please describe how you installed and configured it? > > joachim > I'm glad you asked this question. I needed to add a Spanish language dictionary to cocoAspell and with a little googling and command line work, I got it working. The cocoAspell project appears moribund, the documentation is incomplete, and the site is beginning to suffer from link rot. I think the next time I need to install and configure LyX, I'll just install aspell using Fink and eschew using cocoAspell to make it available as an OS X service. First, install cocoAspell and make sure it's working properly with LyX as an English language spellchecker. That's pretty straight forward. cocoAspell installs a number of things. It installs aspell itself in /usr/local/bin and /usr/local/lib. It installs a preference pane in system preferences. It installs a large number of English dictionaries. It installs a service in ~/Library/Services. That's all OK. If you want the aspell service available in all user accounts, you'll need to move that last item, as root, to /Library/Services (you'll probably have to create that directory). If you just need the service available in the account from which you installed it, just leave things as cocoAspell installed it. You'll need to choose one of the available English dictionaries in the preference pane. Then in LyX preferences you choose aspell as the spellchecker and add this line to the Alternative Language field: /Library/Application Support/cocoAspell/aspell6-en-6.0-0/english.alias That's just following the instructions in the Wiki. Test that you can now spellcheck an English language document in LyX. Next, you'll need to download and install a German language dictionary. The link at the cocoAspell site is dead. Use this one: ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/aspell/dict/0index.html Unzip the file and follow the README instructions to install the dictionary into aspell (it's the usual command line sequence of ./configure, make, make install, make clean). Now copy or move the dictionary directory (in my case it is aspell6-es-1.9a-1) to /Library/Application Support/cocoAspell. Chown the directory to match the English language directory ownership (it should be the name of your admin account as owner and 501 as group). Here's the tricky step. Be sure System Preferences is not running. Get into the command line and become root. Run System Preferences as root! Don't use the open command, instead give the full path to the executable: /Applications/System\ Preferences.app/Contents/MacOS/System\ Preferences Do one thing and one thing only while running System Preferences as root. Click on the Spelling preference pane that cocoAspell installed so it finds, compiles and configures your new dictionary. Quit System Preferences. Reopen it from the GUI. You should now be able to choose your new dictionary. To use your new dictionary, change the Alternative Language field in LyX preferences appropriately. In my case, it's: /Library/Application Support/cocoAspell/aspell6-es-1.9a-1/spanish.alias Voilà! I now have Spanish language spellchecking in LyX. -- Rich TalleyMacTeXLive 2008 - LyX 1.6.3 MacBook Pro (Intel) OS X 10.5.8 Leopard -- Dealing with failure is easy: Work hard to improve. Success is also easy to handle: You've solved the wrong problem. Work hard to improve. -- Alan Perlis
