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ENCHANT(5)		      File Formats Manual		    ENCHANT(5)

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 en-
       chant-lsmod-2. `*' is used to mean "use	this  ordering	for  all  lan-
       guages, 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	start-
       ing 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  En-
       chant  does  not	support	Ispell as a provider, it's still fine to share
       word lists with it.)  Other spell-checkers supported by Enchant are ei-
       ther 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 ~/.con-
       fig/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 dictio-
       nary, 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_DE-
	      BUG to libenchant	will cause Enchant to  output  debugging  mes-
	      sages to standard	error. See the GLib documentation for more de-
	      tails.

FILES AND DIRECTORIES
       Enchant looks in	the following places for user files, in	decreasing or-
       der 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\Ap-
	      plication	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 or-
       dering files:

       /usr/local/etc/enchant-2
	      (Or  the equivalent location relative to the enchant library for
	      a	relocatable build.)

       /usr/local/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)

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