Editing user dictionary (spell checker function)

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Adeckwatt
Posts: 17
Joined: Fri Jan 31, 2020 5:43 pm

Editing user dictionary (spell checker function)

Post by Adeckwatt »

Dear SoftMaker team!

First of all I`d like to thank you for SoftMaker FreeOffice and namely for TextMaker. I tried to use other text processors and your software is the best in its combination of optionality and compatibility with MS Office formats. This is actually my second attempt to migrate to your free software from MS Office, and I really appreciate your work.

Nevertheless, I side with those https://forum.softmaker.com/viewtopic.p ... ker#p73253 who think TextMaker needs an improved spell checker and a wholesome grammar checker to finally replace Word (however, it remarkably degrades itself). I understand it is not an easy matter, that`s why I want to find out what can be done on my personal side while using TextMaker.

The first question is about user dictionary, that is a collection of words I add to TextMaker myself via mouse right click for TextMaker to recognize and not to underline red as misspelled ones. The problem is I work with texts containing lots of specific notions which TextMaker and Hunspell dictionary cannot know, but I have a huge list of these words for my needs in a .txt file, so I could import all or them in TextMaker`s user dictionary. But these words are so numerous that adding them one by one would take so much time that it`s just not practical. So my first question is whether I can find some file in which TextMaker stores user dictionary words, open it with some editing software (like Notepad or even PlanMaker) and just copy and paste all the words I need at once. Maybe, if there is no possibility to do so with TextMaker`s user dictionary, I can find a Hunspell dictionary file and undertake the same algorithm there?

The second question refers to grammar checker. It seems to me that some of its features can be realized by a slightly modified spell checker function in some primitive, but working way. For example, there are cases in which I put commas between certain words because in my native language they are needed, but in English they are not, for instance "but when". If I could somehow exclude the word combination "but, when" with a comma (which is a mistake as far as I know) from a spell checker wordbase as one word unit, that would be underlined as a mistake. In other words, if combinations of several words could be excluded from the existing dictionary (TextMaker user dictionary/Hunspell) at least together with punctuation marks or without them, TextMaker would draw user`s attention to them as misspelled, thus there would appear a mechanism to add simple grammar rules like in my example manually, and that alone would be of great help. Hope the idea is clear.

Thanks for your work and support. Thanks for your answer in advance.
Jossi
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Re: Editing user dictionary (spell checker function)

Post by Jossi »

User-defined dictionary entries are stored in C:/Users/<USERNAME>/MyDocuments/Softmaker/Settings/*.udc.
ukeng.udc is British English, useng.udc American English and so on. *.udc files are text files which can be edited with any text editor.
But as I am working myself with the full commercial version of TextMaker, I'm not quite sure if this functionality (user dictionary) is available in FreeOffice, too.
Adeckwatt
Posts: 17
Joined: Fri Jan 31, 2020 5:43 pm

Re: Editing user dictionary (spell checker function)

Post by Adeckwatt »

Jossi, thank you very much for your help! It seems to work fine, it works for my free version of TextMaker as well, and again it is much easier to find than in Word (I also had to search for its user-defined dictionary to migrate, so to aggregate my dictionaries).

The only thing, in order to exhaust the topic, it would be great to find out where Hunspell stores its own word base. So I get Hunspell from the SoftMaker download page, then add it in TextMaker, and I cannot find it anywhere in Textmaker folder. I guess Hunspell list of words should be stored in some file like user-defined dictionary... This is just curiosity, but it interests me greatly how words are stored there, whether it is editable like user-defined dictionary or not.
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