Dear Maintainer,

please update the included English spell files. They are not
compatible with spell files which vim automatically downloads
from ftp.vim.org:

  :set spelllang en,de
  :set spell
  Cannot find spell file for "de" in utf-8
  Do you want me to try downloading it?
  Downloading de.utf-8.spl...
  "/tmp/vjEMsg7/0.spl" [noeol] 5996L, 2388148C
  In which directory do you want to write the file:
  1. /home/uwe/.vim/spell
  "~/.vim/spell/de.utf-8.spl" [New] 5996L, 2388149C written
  Do you want me to try getting the .sug file?
  This will improve making suggestions for spelling mistakes,
  but it uses quite a bit of memory.
  Downloading de.utf-8.sug...
  "~/.vim/spell/de.utf-8.sug" [New] 19573L, 7989987C written
  1 buffer wiped out
  Error detected while processing /home/uwe/.vim/spell/de.utf-8.spl:
  E763: Word characters differ between spell files

After that download the error message reappears every time I
activate spell checking.

When I manually download the current English spell files from
http://ftp.vim.org/pub/vim/runtime/spell/ and copy them to
/home/uwe/.vim/spell spell checking works as expected without
any error messages.

Regards

Uwe

Thanks for the report.  I'm thinking the easiest solution here is to
stop shipping the English spellfiles, so they get handled like the other
languages.

Ideally, Vim wouldn't need to generate its own dictionaries, but that's
not possible yet.

Cheers,

An interesting part is my Vim reported errors for English UTF-8 .spl
even after downloading a new version from ftp.vim.org to ~/.vim/spell.
What actually caused an error was an old Polish UTF-8 dictionary. After
downloading it from ftp.vim.org the problem stopped and I still use
packaged English spell files.

Hey Uwe,
is there any update to this bug? While the issue itself is fairly minor, this
is a bit annoying in practice.

Thanks
Nico

The issue was raised upstream[0] as well, and the same recommendation
was given -- remove local file and redownload/rebuild.  It seems like
this is something that Vim's spell checker just doesn't handle well, so
unless/until it is replaced with something else, it may be a periodic
issue.

I still hope to get time to allow Vim to use a spell-checking library
instead of its NIH implementation, but seeing as how I haven't had time
to complete in the past few years I wouldn't hold my breath on it
getting done soon.

[0]: http://mid.gmane.org/201211222118.qAMLIcag026702@masaka.moolenaar.net