README
1Spell Check Plugin
2==================
3
4.. contents::
5
6
7About
8-----
9This plugin checks the content of the current document in Geany with the spell
10check library Enchant. You can also select a certain text passage, then the
11plugin will only check the selected text. All lines with misspelled words
12are highlighted with a red squiggly underline and the wrong words are printed
13in the messages window at the bottom of Geany together with available
14suggestions. For the plugin to work at all, you need to have the Enchant
15library installed together with at least one backend (Aspell, Myspell,
16Hunspell, ...).
17The plugin's configure dialog lists all available languages/dictionaries
18which can be used for the spell check.
19
20
21Features
22--------
23
24* Check spelling while typing
25* Highlight spelling mistakes
26* Editor-menu integration
27
28
29Usage
30-----
31Install the plugin (https://plugins.geany.org/install.html) then
32load it in Geany's plugin manager. A new menu item in the Tools menu
33will appear. Alternatively, you can assign a keyboard shortcut in
34Geany's preferences dialog to perform a spell check.
35
36
37Configuring custom dictionaries
38-------------------------------
39Especially on Windows, you might need to install the dictionaries (the files
40containing the information for spell checking) manually.
41First, you need to download the dictionary files for the
42languages you want, e.g. from
43https://cgit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice/dictionaries/tree/ or
44https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/language-tools/.
45The downloaded archives should contain one or more .dic and .aff files.
46
47Instructions:
48
491. Download the archive you want to use
502. The downloaded archive with extensions like .xpi or .oxt is actually a ZIP
51 archive, so extract it as usual (e.g. with 7-Zip or another ZIP
52 unpacker). Extract the contents into a folder of your choice,
53 e.g. `C:\\dictionaries`
543. If the extracted dictionary files contain hyphens ("-"), replace them
55 with underscores
564. Then open to the Spell Check plugin preferences dialog in Geany and
57 choose the folder you just created. You may need to restart Geany
58 and then the installed dictionaries should be available
59
60Note: if you are using Enchant 2.0 or later (the library used by the SpellCheck
61plugin), you need to move the dictionaries into a subfolder called "hunspell"
62in the directory you created above. The directory to be configured in the
63plugin's configuration dialog still is the directory above that folder.
64To check which Enchant version you are using, check "Help->Debug Messages" in
65Geany and find the appropriate log message telling about the Enchant version.
66
67Example::
68
69 C:\
70 ├── dictionaries
71 │ └── hunspell
72 │ ├── ca_ES.aff
73 │ ├── ca_ES.dic
74 │ ├── cs.dic
75 │ ├── cs.dic
76 │ ├── de_DE_frami.aff
77 │ ├── de_DE_frami.dic
78 │ ├── en_GB.aff
79 │ └── en_GB.dic
80 └── ...
81
82Then in the plugin configuration dialog set the dictionary for
83dictionary files to: `C:\\dictionaries`.
84
85
86Maintaining personal dictionaries
87---------------------------------
88When you manually add words to your personal dictionary
89(using the "Add <word> to Dictionary" menu item), those words are stored
90in a personal dictionary per language.
91If you want to add, modify or remove words from these dictionaries,
92you need to open the dictionaries with an editor like Geany and edit them.
93As far as we know, there is no graphical tool to edit those files. However,
94they are plain text files with one word per line.
95
96These files are usually located in:
97`/home/<username>/.config/enchant/<LANG>.dic`.
98The exact storage location might differ between operating systems.
99
100Additional informationcan be found on https://github.com/AbiWord/enchant,
101section "Sharing personal word lists between spell-checkers".
102
103
104Known issues
105------------
106* Spell checking with some languages like Hindi might be incorrect, i.e. some
107 words are incorrectly marked as correctly spelled or marked incorrectly
108 as misspelled.
109* Crashes of Geany when loading the Spell Check plugin after it was unloaded.
110 This can happen when you are using a dictionary from the Zemberek provider
111 of Enchant (mostly Turkish dictionaries).
112 It can also happen when you tried to use a non-existing
113 dictionary and the Zemberek provider is installed on your system.
114 To avoid these crashes you have the following options:
115
116 * Do not load the plugin after it was unloaded, restart Geany first
117 * Do not use any of the dictionaries provided by the Zemberek provider
118 * Update your Enchant version at least to 1.4.3 (once it is released)
119 * Uninstall the Zemberek provider
120
121 Background:
122 These crashes are all related to the Zemberek provider in Enchant.
123 In version 1.4.2 and prior of Enchant, this provider/backend always
124 claimed to support any given invalid dictionary name and so it was
125 active and caused these crashes on load after unload of the plugin.
126 This provider is DBus-based and uses the GObject type
127 registration system which is not really capable of being unloaded and
128 loaded again.
129
130
131Requirements
132------------
133
134* GTK >= 2.8.0
135* Geany >= 0.21
136
137
138Ideas, questions, patches and bug reports
139-----------------------------------------
140Send it to me at enrico(dot)troeger(at)uvena(dot)de
141or report them at https://github.com/geany/geany-plugins/issues.
142