B.3 Curses Notes

If you are having problems compiling check_funs.cpp then the most likely reason is due to incompatibilities with the curses implementation on your system. You should first try disabling the “wide” curses library with the --disable-wide-curses configure option. By doing so you will lose support for properly displaying UTF-8 characters but you may still be able to get the full screen interface. If this fails then you can disable curses support altogether with the --disable-curses configure option. By doing this you will lose the nice full screen interface but hopefully you will be able to at least get Aspell to compile correctly.

If the curses library is installed in a non-standard location then you can specify the library and include directory with --enable-curses=lib and --enable-curses-include=dir.

lib can either be the complete path of the library—for example

/usr/local/curses/libcurses.a

or the name of the library (for example ncurses) or a combined location and library in the form -Llibdir -llib (for example -L/usr/local/ncurses/lib -lncurses).

dir is the location of the curses header files (for example /usr/local/ncurses/include).

B.3.1 Unicode Support

In order for Aspell to correctly spell check UTF-8 documents in full screen mode the “wide” version of the curses library must be installed. This is different from the normal version of curses library, and is normally named libcursesw (with a ‘w’ at the end) or libncursesw. UTF-8 documents will not display correctly without the right curses version installed.

In addition your system must also support the mblen function. Although this function was defined in the ISO C89 standard (ANSI X3.159-1989), not all systems have it.