
                  Technical Notes for Word List authors 
                        and Package Maintainers

In order to make things as straight forward, portable, and uniform, I
have decided to enforce the following rules.

1) All language names are now the two letter ISO code (en, da) etc.
2) The actual dictionary files must all start with the two letter
code and end in .rws and may only contain ASCII characters.
3) Alias are created using Aspell's multi files and not symbolic links.

These rules are very different from the current way dictionaries are
handled but I fell they will make life easier for everyone.  

The reason for the first rule is because in the past the Aspell
language names were a mixture of the name spelled out in English and
the name spelled out in the native language and in some cases involved
non-ASCII characters which was just asking for trouble on non-Unix
like platforms and probably some older Unix ones.  Some people want as
far as doing it both ways by symbolically linking one language data
file to the other.  This amazingly worked but it is a complete abuse
of how languages names and data files are meant to be used.  Finally
others, thought that language variants (American, Swiss German, etc.)
should be considered separate languages and either attempt to specify
them as a language at the command line, for example trying "aspell
--lang=canadian ..." or creating separate data files for them.  All of
this did no good but to confuse people so I wanted to formalize this
and was originally planning on using the language name spelled out in
ASCII characters but released that in many cases I didn't know what
this should be so I decided to go with the universal known language
codes.

The second rule is there so that is is clear which words lists belong
to which languages.  I require them to be all ASCII characters for
maximum portability.  However, the end user is not expected to use
these words lists directly.  Instead they are expected to use one of
the aliases created via the .multi file.  These alias can be anything
what so every and may included non ASCII characters.  Symbolic links
are not used as there are Unix specific and not supported by Win32.
Non-ASCII characters are okay for aliases as they can simply not be
installed on platforms which don't support them.

