[tlug] How to do spell checking for macron containing words with aspell

[David Riggs <david.riggs@example.com>]

Dear TLUG,

I cannot get the standard spell checker "aspell" to handle words with macrons, i.e. romanized Japanese words with long o or u.

If add e.g. Tōkyō to my user dictionary, and specify my user dictionary to be in utf8 (put "utf-8" at the end of the first line of ~.aspell.en.pws ) it will accept words like Tōkyō (with the macrons) in the dictionary file. But when I run aspell,  accepts both  Tōkyō  and  Tokyo (without the macrons). 

I've tried various things, like putting the following on the invocation of aspell:
--encoding=utf-8 --run-together --add-dict-alias="en_US en_US-w_accents" 
but they make no difference.

Any suggestions about getting aspell to work or another spell checker (hopefully one that will run in emacs.)

David Riggs
(now in Oberlin, OH)