Word characters differ between spell files (E763)

Question

Synopsis

I am having trouble resolving Vim error E763: Word characters differ between spell files.

Details

My .vimrc includes multiple spell languages:

set spelllang=en,de,pt,fr

When running Vim for the first time, it prompts for downloading the missing spell files and puts them into .vim/spell. With my above configuration, this results in the three files de.utf-8.spl, fr.utf-8.spl, and pt.utf-8.spl. (The english one ships with the Vim package.)

The documentation for E763 mentions:

Vim allows you to use spell checking for several languages in the same file. You can list them in the 'spelllang' option. As a consequence all spell files for the same encoding must use the same word characters, otherwise they can't be combined without errors. If you get a warning that the word tables differ you may need to generate the .spl file again with :mkspell. Check the FOL, LOW and UPP lines in the used .aff file.

The XX.ascii.spl spell file generated with the "-ascii" argument will not contain the table with characters, so that it can be combine with spell files for any encoding. The .add.spl files also do not contain the table.

It seems that I need to regenerate the word tables, but the steps to do so do not follow directly from the manual. How shall I proceed?

Answer 1

I had the exact same problem. I resolved it by asking the experts on the vim_dev mailing list.

The solution, straight from the horse's mouth:

Try replacing the en_gb spell file that you installed long ago with one downloaded from the server now. The files on the site have been updated some time ago to fix a mistake.

Unfortunately there is no "update runtime files" command yet.

You can find the full thread here.