How to add Spell Checker to TeXworks

Question

I installed TeXworks and I was trying to install a spell checker but I couldn't. I installed OpenOffice but nothing changed, the combo-box of spell checkers in TeXworks is empty. I am working on Windows.

Answer 1

As per the TeXworks manual, the procedure to install spell checking dictionaries in TeXworks is as follows.

1. Download the dictionary corresponding to your desired language from the OpenOffice.org extensions site.
2. Change the file extension of the downloaded file from .oxt to .zip and extract the files with your archive utility of choice.
3. Open TeXworks and select Settings and Resources from the Help menu. A dialog window will open with a link to the TeXworks resources folder.
4. Click the link to open the resources folder. If there is no dictionaries subfolder there yet, then create it now. Open the (possibly newly created) dictionaries subfolder.
5. Copy the .dic and .aff files from the downloaded .zip file to the dictionaries subfolder.
6. Close and reopen TeXworks. The dictionaries should be listed under the Spelling item in the Edit menu.

Answer 2

If you happen to be a Linux user, symlinks help you implement the accepted solution much faster. I have done this with Ubuntu 16.04 and TeXworks 0.6.4.

Information

• Re spell-chekers and so, according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunspell

  Hunspell is based on MySpell and is backward-compatible with MySpell dictionaries. While MySpell uses a single-byte character encoding, Hunspell can use Unicode UTF-8-encoded dictionaries.

• Dictionaries are typically installed in /usr/share

  • Check with ls /usr/share/*spell* -d what they are. In my case, the directories are aspell, hunspell, myspell.

• TeXworks will want pairs of *.aff *.dic files.

  • So you can search with find /usr/share/*spell* -name *dic | sort. These files are in hunspell and myspell directories.

  • I was lacking some. To get the catalogue, do apt search hunspell-; the trailing hyphen helps skimming the search results. You can then shortlist the packages you want from the locale tag, say hunspell-pt-pt for Portuguese of Portugal.

• TeXworks has it in section 4.3 Spell-checking of the manual that

  Before using the spell-checker, you need to install dictionaries in the right folder of TeXworks: [resources]\dictionaries. The [resources] folder can be accessed easily via Help→Settings and Resources. . . .

  Linux users forgive the backward slash and those folder for directory. For me [resources] this is ~/home/user/.TeXworks

Action

1. Install system-wide your preferred package(s) with sudo install hunspell-[your choice].

   You will find that the directory list ls /usr/share/hunspell contains the aff/dic files of your choice now.

2. With ln -s /usr/share/hunspell [resources]/dictionaries I linked one-off the entity dictionaries to the full set of HunSpell dictionaries installed system-wide.

Benefit

Basically, any time I want a dictionary for TeXworks I install it from the HunSpell suite via the package management software.

I then find it up and running anywhere, and in TeXworks. I don't have to roam around the internet, rename, decompress and move around files.

Offnotes

Since Hunspell is a superset of MySpell, I got the Hunspell family of dictionaries in the hunspell directory even after installing the myspell-tagged packages