Wednesday, June 22, 2011

Installing Spell Checker in TeXworks (Mac)

Installing spell checker in TeXworks is going to be straightforward after I write this note.
The dicttionary for TeXworks is located at:
/Users/gajab/Library/TeXworks/dictionaries
where gajab is your username.



One easy source of dictionaries is the OpenOffice.org project, which uses the same spelling engine. There is a list of available dictionaries at http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Dictionaries (see the All Language Packs download, or links to individual language dictionaries). Note that TeXworks only uses the spelling dictionaries (*.dic and *.aff) for each language ...

  • So I downloaded the dictionary file from
    http://extensions.services.openoffice.org/en/dictionaries
    It is located currently at:
    http://extensions.services.openoffice.org/en/project/en_US-dict
  • However, the file is saved as .oxt.  I simply renamed the package as a zip file
    en_US.oxt >> en_US.zip
    and unzipped the package (well, double click and rename along with the extension. It warns, but you can change the extension). It worked!!
    The package contains:
    META-INF description.xml en_US.aff info
    README_en_US.txt dictionaries.xcu en_US.dic
  • WE only need .dic and .aff files. So I copied it to the library folder for the TeXworks.



cp ~/Downloads/en_US/en_US.aff /Users/gajab/Library/TeXworks/dictionaries
cp ~/Downloads/en_US/en_US.dic /Users/gajab/Library/TeXworks/dictionaries

The dictionary worked nicely after I restarted the TeXworks.

Guide to LaTeX (4th Edition)More Math Into LaTeX, 4th EditionLaTeX: A Document Preparation System (2nd Edition)

32 comments:

Anonymous said...

thx for this post! I was close to change to eclipse because of the "missing" spell check feature ^^

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the post!

Anonymous said...

Thanks a lot. I spent three hours searching on Google.

O_o said...

Thanks! you saved me time!

Anonymous said...

Many thanks! This post really helps!

Anonymous said...

This is very helpful, thanks a lot.

Anonymous said...

Spell Checker component

Anonymous said...

THANKS SO MUCH! after an hour googleing, this one saved me.

Anonymous said...

Thanks! I finally got spellcheck on TexWorks.

Anonymous said...

Thank you. Very helpful.

Anonymous said...

Thanks so much! so simple and useful

Anonymous said...

Wonderful, thank you

Anonymous said...

Yay! Thanks so much for the great step by step guide! That makes it all so much easier!!! :)

Anonymous said...

Thank you very much! Same procedure works for windows too.

Anonymous said...

Thanks. It also solved my problem. (Mac 10.10)

Anonymous said...

Thanks a lot. It solved my problem on Mac 10.10.

Anonymous said...

Great, it worked for me.
Thanks

Anonymous said...

I've been suffering for so long without spellcheck in texworks, those days are over!

Anonymous said...

Many thanks. It also worked for me!

Anonymous said...

I'm gonna echo what everybody else has already said. Many thanks for the post!

Anonymous said...

Thanks man! your description worked for me.

Anonymous said...

Thanks a lot mate! It worked on my 10.8 OS.

Twilight said...

Everything okay up to the point where I can't seem to copy the two files to "dictionaries" as OS X Yosemite claims it is not a directory! How to proceed?

NKM said...

Hi Twilight, do you have /Library/TeXworks/dictionaries folder?

Anonymous said...

I have the same problem as Twillight, I can't find the dictionary folder. Where should it be located?
I tried to go through application/teXworks but I can only find the TeXWorks application and no dictionary .... =/

Unknown said...

For those who don't have a dictionaries directory, just creating one and then putting the files in it will work. Make sure it's spelled correctly, and note you may need to restart the program to see it take effect.

Twilight said...

I still have a problem. I have looked for all "Library" folders on my Mac and, in each one, I created subdirectories named TeXworks/dictionaries and put the dic and aff files there and restarted Texworks. No success. The claim is that TeXworks creates a Library folder on installation but I'm sure it didn't. Now what? I'm on p. 350 of a book I am writing and I really, really need this spell checker. Thanks.

Unknown said...

It sounds like you put new, empty 'TeXworks/dictionaries' directories in all directories named Library, and didn't find the actual install location. You want to look for where the Library folder is that has a TeXworks directory populated with things already.

It should be noted that, for whatever reason, most (maybe all) Library folders from Apple are hidden by default on OSX (ie. you look for it in finder but can't find it, but in the terminal it's there), and this could be the cause of your problem. Also, for most of us it seems the TeXworks directory is in our home Library, but it may also be in /Library, /System/Library, or a variety of other locations. If you're still having trouble finding it, a simple search can be done using the built-in 'find' in terminal:

cd /
sudo find . -type d -name "TeXworks" -print

This will look for all directories from the very top-down with the name "TeXworks", and assuming you've removed all those other directories named "TeXworks" you said you created, will give you the correct path. The TeXworks directory it finds shouldn't be empty, for instance mine had /completion, /configuration, /scripts, and /translations directories in it already.

NKM said...

Thanks Jesse! I hope your suggestion will work out for Twilight!
(Also good luck with the book!)

Unknown said...

Hi Jessie. Thank you so very much! Using the suggestions you provided I finally found that hidden directory and copied the right files into it and now the spell checker works!! Thanks to everyone in this group for helping out. I am truly grateful. (As you can imagine, so many typos can enter such a large ms.)

Unknown said...

Thanks so much, very easy to follow post and making my life with TeXworks so much easier!

Anonymous said...

thank you so much!!!! can't thank you enough!!!