Foreign language dictionary location and installation

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Fraser Muirhead
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Joined: 2007-02-15 14:54:14

Foreign language dictionary location and installation

Post by Fraser Muirhead »

I would like to use a German language dictionary/spell checker in Nisus Pro. Where are foreign dictionaries located? How do I install such items? Thanks for your help.
Cletus Awreetus-Awrightus
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Post by Cletus Awreetus-Awrightus »

Nisus uses the Cocoa spellchecking mechanism (the process is called AppleSpell). If your OS installation includes German spellcheck, Nisus should be able to use it automatically (provided you set your document's language to German).
PowerPC; Mac OS 10.5.8; NWP 1.4
Fraser Muirhead
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Post by Fraser Muirhead »

Thanks - not only the document but the language for the machine up in the main menu.

Changing both did the job.
xenon134
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Re: Foreign language dictionary location and installation

Post by xenon134 »

I have 3 foreign languages selected in System Preferences --> International --> Language "for use in application menus, dialogs, and sorting". But when I check off any of these languages in a NWP document, the spellchecker remains stuck in English and does not spellcheck the foreign words. How can I get NWP to spellcheck foreign words? Aspell has many foreign dictionaries but how can they be made available to NWP?)
If you solve that problem will NWP handle documents containing more than one language? Even Eudora can do simultaneous spell checks for mixed English and German text. Surely NWP, with its outstanding multilingual capabilities, should do no less.
capvideo
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Re: Foreign language dictionary location and installation

Post by capvideo »

I just made a simple document:
Four score and sevenx years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation.
Au revoir mes amist!
I left the first paragraph as English and marked the second paragraph as French (using the Languages palette). When I chose Edit:Spelling:Spelling Window… it successfully gave me options in English for "sevenx" and options in French for "amist".

It also correctly highlighted only those two words as spelling issues via automatic dashed-red underlining.

I did a little playing around with adding a language to a style, and it appears to work there, too, at least in this simple text.
xenon134
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Re: Foreign language dictionary location and installation

Post by xenon134 »

Your method indeed works for major languages (I tried English and German). But it is inconvenient for documents where a few foreign words are scattered here and there throughout the text. Eudora can handle such cases automatically, checking 2 dictionaries at once.

But NWP does not spellcheck less common languages such as Latvian, although it does appear in the Apple list.

I hope somebody has a solution.
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martin
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Re: Foreign language dictionary location and installation

Post by martin »

xenon134 wrote:Your method indeed works for major languages (I tried English and German). But it is inconvenient for documents where a few foreign words are scattered here and there throughout the text. Eudora can handle such cases automatically, checking 2 dictionaries at once.
NWP's language system only allows assigning one spelling dictionary to one language at a time. Apple/OSX does provide a "Multilingual" spelling dictionary, which you could assign to your NWP languages, but I'm not sure what words the Apple dictionary covers.
But NWP does not spellcheck less common languages such as Latvian, although it does appear in the Apple list.
NWP itself does not provide any spelling dictionaries. NWP just picks up whatever dictionaries you have installed on your system. It looks like there is a Latvian Aspell dictionary, but I've never tried it and don't know how good it is.
ptram
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Re: Foreign language dictionary location and installation

Post by ptram »

This thread reminds me of the slow death of my native language - Italian - spoken by a population that prefers to use what they think are English words when they can use Italian words, and oversimplify everything. Modern Italian texts are a very inelegant mix between the cheapest Italian and lower-grade 'English". I wonder how people manage spell-checking on their hybrid documents.

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flips
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Re: Foreign language dictionary location and installation

Post by flips »

Does anyone know if there's Norwegian dictionaries available?
(The closes I found in my menues her, was swedish, but I am not sure if I installed everything when upgrading to snow leopard ...)

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flips :)
flips :)
Kino
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Re: Foreign language dictionary location and installation

Post by Kino »

A Norwegian dictionary is not included in OS X installation but, in Snow Leopard, you can use hunspell dictionaries.

1. Download http://alioth.debian.org/frs/download.p ... 2.0.10.zip and unzip it;
2. Unzip nb_NO.zip and nn_NO.zip contained in the unzipped folder;
3. Put nb_NO.aff and nb_NO.dic (Bokmål) and/or nn_NO.aff and nn_NO.dic (Nynorsk) in /Users/you/Library/Spelling/.

Those who are running Leopard or Tiger can use aspell dictionaries together with cocoAspell.
http://people.ict.usc.edu/~leuski/cocoaspell/
ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/aspell/dict/nb/as ... -0.tar.bz2 (Bokmål)
ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/aspell/dict/nn/as ... -1.tar.bz2 (Nynorsk)

Of course, there’s nothing wrong in using cocoAspell in Snow Leopard.
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flips
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Re: Foreign language dictionary location and installation

Post by flips »

Yay, great, thanks! :)
Can OSX/Nisus also utilize the Thesaurus and/or Hyphenation files included in no_NO-pack2-2.0.10.zip as well?

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flips :)
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Kino
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Re: Foreign language dictionary location and installation

Post by Kino »

No, unfortunately. Snow Leopard supports just spelling dictionaries. Perhaps Martin & co. could convert the Thesaurus files so that Nisus Thesaurus understand them, but I don’t know. As to hyphenation, only US English rules are supported. I think the best way to incite Apple to support those of Norwegian and other languages would be to send a feedback (enhancement request) to Apple as I wrote in another thread.
http://nisus.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=16979#p16979
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flips
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Re: Foreign language dictionary location and installation

Post by flips »

Submitted request/bug report ... :)
flips :)
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