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 dictionaries 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 Enchant’s personal word lists  with  other  spelling  checkers
       that  use  the same format (note that other spell-checkers may not support comments!). The spell-checkers
       known to be compatible are Hunspell, Nuspell and Ispell. (Although Enchant does not support Ispell  as  a
       provider,  it’s  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  checker’s  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 debugging 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, Hunspell, 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.

                                                                                                      ENCHANT(5)