Build instructions for the Norwegian spell checking system

Getting the source

A source tarball is available from alioth, and the latest development version is available from CVS. See the Alioth project page for download instructions.

Build dependencies

The build is using binaries from ispell to generate the list of base words with affixes based on a list of words and frequency information. This is the source for the other spell checking systems. To speed up this build, ssed is used instead of the slow GNU sed.

To generate aspell and myspell files, one first need ispell and then aspell or myspell.

Building and installing the ispell/aspell/myspell data files

There are four useful 'top level' makefile targets; words, ispell, myspell and aspell. Each of these have install targets as well; install-words, install-ispell, install-myspell and install-aspell. In addition there are install targets for the scripts (install-scripts) and documentation (install-doc). The DESTDIR variable is supposed for convenience. All of the build and install targets can be called with nb and nn variants, for example install-ispell-nb to only install the nb version.

So, to build and install the myspell dictionary, this is the command:

make install-myspell DESTDIR=/some/path

Building the tarball and distribution files

The tarball is generated using the dist makefile target. It is best to use the distcheck target instead to do a test build of the generated tarball to check if all the required files are included. This target will also generate a package for OpenOffice.org (no_NO-version.zip) as well as the spell-norwegian-version.tar.gz tarball.

make distcheck

Old instructions

Short information for building the word list with cvs checkout.

Steps for building wordlists.

Download ispell.3.2.06
Untar ispell package
Patch with ispell patch from cvs
copy files for cvs into languages/norsk folder inside ispell folder.
build ispell. (ispell is a bit tricky to build some times, check out the Readme file included in the ispell-tarball)
go to languages/norsk folder
make -f Makefile.new myspell-dist
make -f Makefile.new aspell-dist
the aspell tar.bz2 files are aspell wordlists
and myspell files are there.

To make the ispell files type

make all

this will make the nynorsk.hash and bokmal.hash ispell files.