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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 ex-
     ample, 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 par-
     ticular  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 per-
     sonal 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  di-
     rectory;  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-check-
     ers, 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/en-
     chant/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  stan-
	    dard 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\Applica-
	    tion Data\enchant

     Dictionaries  for	some providers are looked for in a subdirectory with the
     same name as the provider, for  example  ~/.config/enchant/hunspell.   Cur-
     rently 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 order-
     ing 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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