Make hunspell work with emacs and german language

Question

I have a wordpress blog and what I need is a plugin which adds an info box like http://css-tricks.com/examples/ScrollingSidebar/ whose content can be defined when writing an article. Is there something like that out there or do you have ideas how to accomplish that?

So the box is always there, but the content changes for each article.

Thanks!

Solution

To check if the dictionary is listed in the path run hunspell -D. It should output something along those lines:

...
/usr/share/hunspell/en_US
/usr/share/hunspell/de_BE
/usr/share/hunspell/de_LU
/usr/share/hunspell/de_DE
...

Next, add your preferred dictionaries to ispell-local-dictionary-alist in your .emacs file

(add-to-list 'ispell-local-dictionary-alist '("deutsch-hunspell"
                                              "[[:alpha:]]"
                                              "[^[:alpha:]]"
                                              "[']"
                                              t
                                              ("-d" "de_DE"); Dictionary file name
                                              nil
                                              iso-8859-1))

(add-to-list 'ispell-local-dictionary-alist '("english-hunspell"
                                              "[[:alpha:]]"
                                              "[^[:alpha:]]"
                                              "[']"
                                              t
                                              ("-d" "en_US")
                                              nil
                                              iso-8859-1))

(setq ispell-program-name "hunspell"          ; Use hunspell to correct mistakes
      ispell-dictionary   "deutsch-hunspell") ; Default dictionary to use

In addition to that you can define a function to switch between the german and english dictionaries and bind it to C-c d for example

(defun switch-dictionary-de-en ()
  "Switch german and english dictionaries."
  (interactive)
  (let* ((dict ispell-current-dictionary)
         (new (if (string= dict "deutsch-hunspell") "english-hunspell"
                   "deutsch-hunspell")))
    (ispell-change-dictionary new)
    (message "Switched dictionary from %s to %s" dict new)))

(global-set-key (kbd "C-c d") 'switch-dictionary-de-en)

Comments

[Christian Herenz]

Note that the dictonary names are different for hunspell compared to ispell. Instead of (setq ispell-dictionary "deutsch8"), you should use (setq ispell-dictionary "de_DE"). Note, however, that this requires emacs 24.4 or greater. For earlier versions you need add the definitions to ispell-local-dictionary-alist as provided in the accepted answer.

[student]

Thanks. I think you should add a (require 'ispell) before the (add-to-list 'ispell-local...) line.

[antonio]

I think it will not hurt if I add a little comment for those Windows users who might fall on this. In Windows Emacs has the LANG environment variable set to the regional settings. It is a good idea to add something like (setenv "LANG" "en_US") to your init file. This will be your initial dictionary, unless you change it. The default LANG value might be set to something possibly weird (say ENG), generating an ispell/hunspell error.

[legends2k]

@antonio True, but in my case, (setenv "DICTIONARY" "en_GB") worked.

[Christian Herenz]

The creation of custom dictionary entries for hunspell is not required for emacs > 24.