enchant

ENCHANT(5) File Formats Manual ENCHANT(5)

NAME

   Enchant - enchant language tags, ordering files and personal word lists

LANGUAGE TAGS

   Enchant identifies dictionaries by their language tag. A language tag is typically an IETF BCP 47 language tag of the form LANGUAGE_COUNTRY; for example, en_US or zh_SG. Multiple dic
   tionaries  may be used together by giving a comma-separated list; for example en_GB,fr_FR.  This can be useful for checking multi-lingual text, or for using specialised word lists for
   a particular subject, project or document (these might have names such as en-medical or en-my-novel).

ORDERING FILE

   Enchant uses global and per-user ordering files named enchant.ordering to decide which spelling provider to use for particular languages.  The per-user file takes precedence.

   The ordering file takes the form language_tag:<comma-separated list of spelling providers>.  To see what dictionaries are available, run enchant-lsmod-2. * is used to mean use this
   ordering for all languages, unless instructed otherwise. For example:

          *:aspell,hunspell,nuspell
          en:aspell,hunspell,nuspell
          en_GB:hunspell,nuspell,aspell
          fr:hunspell,nuspell,aspell

PERSONAL WORD LISTS

   Personal word lists are simple plain text files with one word per line.  The name of the file starts with the language tag and ends .dic.  Each personal word list has a  corresponding
   exclude  file,  ending  in .exc, which lists words that are found in the dictionary but that the user wants to be considered invalid.  The files are stored in an Enchant configuration
   directory; see FILES AND DIRECTORIES below.  Lines starting with a hash sign #’ are ignored.

SHARING PERSONAL WORD LISTS BETWEEN SPELL-CHECKERS

   It is possible, and usually safe, to share Enchants personal word lists with other spelling checkers that use the same format (note that other spell-checkers  may  not  support  com
   ments!).  The spell-checkers known to be compatible are Hunspell, Nuspell and Ispell. (Although Enchant does not support Ispell as a provider, its still fine to share word lists with
   it.)  Other spell-checkers supported by Enchant are either incompatible, or have no personal word list mechanism. There may well be yet other spell-checkers, unknown to Enchant,  that
   use the same format.

   Some  applications  use Hunspell or Nuspell, but store the personal word list under another name or in another location; Firefox and Thunderbird do this. Firefox also seems to reorder
   its word list when updating it; again, this is OK, as the result is still in the same format.

   To share word lists with Enchant, find the other spelling checkers word list file, e.g. ~/.hunspell_fr_FR or ~/.config/nuspell/fr_FR, and merge  it  with  the  corresponding  Enchant
   file, in this case ~/.config/enchant/fr_FR.dic. Use the following command, replacing ENCHANT-DICT and OTHER-DICT with the corresponding dictionary file names:

          cat ENCHANT-DICT OTHER-DICT | sort -u > merged.txt

   Take a look at merged.txt to check the merge has worked, then

          mv merged.txt ENCHANT-DICT
          rm OTHER-DICT
          ln -s OTHER-DICT ENCHANT-DICT

   to replace the other dictionary file with a link to the Enchant dictionary, again filling in the name of the dictionary files.

ENVIRONMENT

   The following variables affect the behavior of Enchant:

   ENCHANT_CONFIG_DIR
          A directory in which Enchant should look for configuration files. See below.

   G_MESSAGES_DEBUG
          Enchant  uses GLib's log functions, with the domain libenchant, to output messages useful for debugging. Setting G_MESSAGES_DEBUG to libenchant will cause Enchant to output de
          bugging messages to standard error. See the GLib documentation for more details.

FILES AND DIRECTORIES

   Enchant looks in the following places for user files, in decreasing order of precedence:

   ENCHANT_CONFIG_DIR
          (If the environment variable is set.)

   XDG_CONFIG_HOME/enchant (non-Windows systems)
          Default: ~/.config/enchant

   CSIDL_LOCAL_APPDATA\enchant (Windows systems)
          Default: C:\Documents and Settings\username\Local Settings\Application Data\enchant

   Dictionaries for some providers are looked for in a subdirectory with the same name as the provider, for example ~/.config/enchant/hunspell.  Currently this  works  for  Hspell,  Hun
   spell, Nuspell and Voikko.

   Providers also look in specific system directories, and in some cases and user directories, for their dictionaries; see the documentation for each provider.

   In addition, Enchant looks in the following systems directories for ordering files:

   /etc/enchant-2
          (Or the equivalent location relative to the enchant library for a relocatable build.)

   /usr/share/enchant-2
          (Or the equivalent location relative to the enchant library for a relocatable build.)

SEE ALSO

   enchant-2(1), enchant-lsmod-2(1)

AUTHOR

   Written by Dom Lachowicz and Reuben Thomas.

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