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About

This plugin checks the content of the current document in Geany with the spell check library Enchant. You can also select a certain text passage, then the plugin will only check the selected text. All lines with misspelled words are highlighted with a red squiggly underline and the wrong words are printed in the messages window at the bottom of Geany together with available suggestions. For the plugin to work at all, you need to have the Enchant library installed together with at least one backend (Aspell, Myspell, Hunspell, ...). The plugin's configure dialog lists all available languages/dictionaries which can be used for the spell check.

Features

  • Check spelling while typing
  • Highlight spelling mistakes
  • Editor-menu integration

Usage

After installed successfully, load the plugin in Geany's plugin manager and a new menu item in the Tools menu will appear. Alternatively, you can assign a keyboard shortcut in Geany's preferences dialog to perform a spell check.

Configuring dictionaries on Windows

On Windows, you might need to install the dictionaries (the files containing the information for spell checking) manually. First, you need to download the dictionary files for the languages you want, e.g. from http://extensions.services.openoffice.org/en/dictionaries. Be sure to download the "Spelling" archives from this site. The downloaded archive should contain one or more .dic and .aff files.

Instructions: 

1. Download the archive you want to use
2. The downloaded archive with the extension .oxt is actually a ZIP
	 archive, so extract it as usual (e.g. with 7-Zip or another ZIP
	 unpacker). Extract the contents into a folder of your choice,
	 e.g. C:\dictionaries
3. Then open to the Spell Check plugin preferences dialog in Geany and
	 choose the folder you just created. You may need to restart Geany
	 and then the installed dictionaries should be available

Known issues

  • Spell checking with some languages like Hindi might be incorrect, i.e. some words are incorrectly marked as correctly spelled or marked incorrectly as misspelled.

  • Crashes of Geany when loading the Spell Check plugin after it was unloaded. This can happen when you are using a dictionary from the Zemberek provider of Enchant (mostly Turkish dictionaries). It can also happen when you tried to use a non-existing dictionary and the Zemberek provider is installed on your system. To avoid these crashes you have the following options:

    • Do not load the plugin after it was unloaded, restart Geany first
    • Do not use any of the dictionaries provided by the Zemberek provider
    • Update your Enchant version at least to 1.4.3 (once it is released)
    • Uninstall the Zemberek provider
Background:
These crashes are all related to the Zemberek provider in Enchant. In version 1.4.2 and prior of Enchant, this provider/backend always claimed to support any given invalid dictionary name and so it was active and caused these crashes on load after unload of the plugin. This provider is DBus-based and uses the GObject type registration system which is not really capable of being unloaded and loaded again.

Requirements

  • GTK >= 2.8.0
  • Geany >= 0.21

Ideas, questions, patches and bug reports

Send it to me at enrico(dot)troeger(at)uvena(dot)de or report them at http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=222729.