Document symlinking compatible PWLs together (e.g. ~/.hunspell_LANG)

[audreytoskin]

I started by trying to figure out how to get GEdit and Evolution email client, and other applications, to use the same user personal spelling dictionary, so I wouldn't have to keep re-adding the same words over and over.

As I understand it, gedit uses the GNOME library gspell, and Evolution uses gtkspell3, which both rely on Enchant, which uses hunspell/myspell as a back-end.

This fits with some other applications where I need a spell-checker, so I created the file ~/.hunspell_en_US. It's just plain, line-separated words (so, no /flags). The hunspell CLI accepts the words in this file, but spell-checking in gedit and Evolution still marks those words as misspelled. I originally reported this issue to the gspell Bugzilla, but they say that the problem is more likely in Enchant.

[rrthomas]

Personally, I symlink enchant's wordlist files (~/.config/enchant/en_GB.dic etc., or possibly ~/.enchant/en_GB.dic) to the relevant hunspell files.

Unfortunately, it's not possible to do better at present. It just so happens that Enchant and Hunspell use the same format, so symlinking the files mostly doesn't matter (except that it does: Enchant 1.6.0, the most widely used version presently, and earlier, adds a newline followed by a word, whereas hunspell adds a word followed by a newline: this means that you can end up with

parts
of
your

wordlistlike
this

) which is one reason I took over Enchant maintenance. However, even assuming that your applications all use Enchant 1.6.1 (you can installed it built from source on your system, without recompiling the applications that use it), it is not possible for Enchant to simply use another back-end's word lists without building in assumptions about where they are (fragile, as what happens if Hunspell changes the preferred location? it's not currently possible to ask Hunspell where it is).

Also, some applications do have subtle differences: for example, I noticed recently that Firefox, which uses hunspell, seems to sort its wordlist alphabetically when it saves it out. Probably doesn't matter, but I'm not sure.

Taken altogether, the only obvious way around this is to make every application use Enchant, which sadly is not very likely.

However, if it continues to be the case that Hunspell is by far the most popular back-end for Enchant, it might be reasonable to build some special knowledge about it into Enchant.

I will certainly document the symlinking method for the next release of Enchant, now that it is properly compatible with Hunspell, and leave this bug open to think about in future.

[rrthomas]

The direct use of providers' PWL support is bug #115.