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.

Downloads

Spell Check is part of the combined Geany Plugins release. For more information and downloads, please visit //plugins.geany.org/geany-plugins/

Requirements

For compiling the plugin yourself, you will need the GTK (>= 2.8.0) libraries and header files. You will also need its dependency libraries and header files, such as Pango, Glib and ATK. All these files are available at http://www.gtk.org. Furthermore, you need to have installed enchant with its development files (libenchant-dev or enchant-devel).

And obviously, you will need have Geany installed. If you have Geany installed from the sources, you should be ready to go. If you used a prepared package e.g. from your distribution you probably need to install an additional package, this might be called geany-dev or geany-devel. Please note that in order to compile and use this plugin, you need Geany 0.16 or later.

Furthermore you need, of course, a C compiler and the Make tool. The GNU versions of these tools are recommended.

Installation

Compiling and installing the code is done by the following three commands: $ ./configure $ make $ make install

For more configuration details run $ ./configure --help

If there are any errors during compilation, check your build environment and try to find the error, otherwise contact one of the authors.

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://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Dictionaries. Be sure to download the "Spelling" archives from this site. The downloaded archive should contain one or more .dic and .aff files.

Once you downloaded the dictionaries, extract them into a folder of your choice, e.g. C:dictionaries. 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.

Currently, installing dictionaries into a custom folder only works with Myspell/Hunspell dictionaries (http://hunspell.sourceforge.net/).

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.

License

Spell Check is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. A copy of this license can be found in the file COPYING included with the source code of this program.

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.