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We are a charity that helps disadvantaged people to get back on track. To this end we provide them with paid occupation. One of them is proof-reading/editing of ancient OCRed texts that we release later under the GNU Free Documentation License. Those people do not have technical background, so we need a super simple text editor. Gedit is great for this task. Unfortunately most of those people work on Windows. Gedit being cross-platform helps us here as well. But we can't get Gedit under Windows to spell-check texts. How can we add a dictionary for spell checking in Gedit on Windows? (To be more specific - we need Hebrew spell checking).

user1876484
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1 Answers1

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The procedure to get spell check working is slightly different for the two currently available versions of gedit on Windows. They both support Hunspell, MySpell, and Ispell dictionaries, but I will focus on Hunspell / MySpell here. (I will have a note about Ispell and Aspell at the end.)

Downloading dictionaries

The easiest place to find Hunspell / MySpell dictionaries (*.aff and *.dic files) is from the LibreOffice dictionaries repo (GitHub mirror). Be sure to download the plain / raw files.

For Hebrew, open these links to download the raw files: he_IL.aff, he_IL.dic

For both Windows 64-bit (3.20.1) and 32-bit (2.30.1) versions

(Older versions of gedit are also available for Windows 32-bit but I haven't tried them.)

After installing gedit:

  1. In File Explorer / Windows Explorer, find the gedit program folder (most likely C:\Program Files\gedit or C:\Program Files (x86)\gedit). (If you have installed gedit somewhere else then adjust the following paths accordingly.)
  2. In the share subfolder (C:\Program Files\gedit\share), add a new myspell folder inside share, then add a dicts folder inside myspell.
  3. Copy Hunspell / MySpell dictionaries into the dicts folder (C:\Program Files\gedit\share\myspell\dicts).

If the dictionaries are not recognized for some reason, they can also be placed in C:\Program Files\gedit\share\enchant\myspell.

Extra steps required for 32-bit version

  1. In File Explorer / Windows Explorer, add a series of new folders to create this path: C:\msys\share\xml\iso-codes.
  2. Copy the XML files from C:\Program Files\gedit\share\xml\iso-codes into C:\msys\share\xml\iso-codes.

Ispell and Aspell

Both versions of gedit appear to have Ispell support enabled, but I wasn't able to find any Ispell dictionaries that would work with these builds.

The 64-bit build (3.20.1) doesn't appear to have Aspell support enabled. The 32-bit build (2.30.1) includes the DLL for Aspell, but I don't think Aspell support was enabled in Enchant.

Jeffery To
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