I'm preparing a book draft for publication and about to start spell-checking. I've decided to use aspell, but ancient docn and several inconsistencies have me wanting an overview of the whole area.

At present I'm getting four different spelling standards: one each from my Opera browser, Open Office, aspell and my near-falling-apart Concise Oxford English Dictionary that I regard as the gold standard. I installed the en_GB-ize dict in aspell, and whilst it's an improvement on what was there, I can't find any documentation that explains how to use the interface to build my own wordlist. There are "Add" and "Add lower" options, but I can't locate a file that they modify.

At this stage I'm prepared to spend a bit of time gaining an overview of the whole field. I assume that there standard file formats used by dictionaries, but who defines and maintains them? Can they be converted and used by different apps? How does one RELIABLY implement personal preferences via a wordlist or other means? Etc etc.

Does anyone have experience in this area, or recommendations for concise but clear explanatory material? Most grateful for any suggestions.

OpenOffice and LibreOffice use Hunspell. Gnome applications can be persuaded to use that rather than Aspel by creating /usr/share/enchant/myspell and putting links to the .dic and .aff files there; that's providing they they actually use Enchant, as in the Red Hat family.

The dictionaries are usually in the folder uno_packages, although some distros still use wordbook, within $HOME/.openoffice.org or /usr/lib/openoffice.org.

If you look at the .aff and .doc files, you can see that they're quite complex. There is documentation out there, but it takes a bit of finding and unfortunately I haven't kept the links and it's years since I edited mine. As for Aspel, I've never tried to do anything with that.

Many thanks for the info. Yes, I gathered from the lack of replies that its one of those niche areas that few bother with, myself included, until the need arises. I'll follow up on your suggestions.