Feature request: updated Spanish Hunspell dictionary

[d3m0sth3n3s]

Hi!

I’m Spanish and I have noticed that the included Hunspell dictionary for the Spanish language is outdated and not very complete, so spellchecking results in a lot of false positives.

Could you update the dictionary and affix files to the ones in the RLA-ES project? These are the ones currently used in the Firefox spell checker and many other applications. This Spanish dictionary is not perfect but it’s definitely better and contains more words than the one provided with Sigil.

[KevinH]

You can install that dictionary yourself and Sigil will keep it and use it in place of the Spanish dictionary we have now, even across installs (it is stored in the Sigil Preferences folder).

As for including it in Sigil, that would depend on the exact license used and the authors of that dictionary. We can only include and ship dictionaries that have compatible licenses to the GPL3 license that Sigil uses.

That is why we made possible for user's to install their own dictionaries and have them replace the dictionary in Sigil. Just put the new es.aff and es.dic files inside the hunspell_dictionaries folder inside the Sigil Preferences folder.

You might have to unzip them to get to the actual hunspell files.

Hope this helps.

[KevinH]

I took a look at those dictionaries. I can not read Spanish but it looks like it might be a GPL3 license. Would you please confirm those dictionaries are covered by the GPL3 license?

That said they have lots and lots of spanish dictionaries each for different regions of the world that speak spanish. We can not include all of those variations.

If you could only select one (assuming it is compatible with our license) to create a single es.dic and es.aff, which should be chosen?

Also, as there are many Spanish users of Sigil, I would have to hear some sort of consensus about if these truly should replace our current es dictionary.

If the regional dialects are truly that different, then the user installing his or her own dictionary makes the most sense.

[d3m0sth3n3s]

Originally Posted by KevinH

Would you please confirm those dictionaries are covered by the GPL3 license?

Yes, they are. Translated into English from the project’s license page:

The project and the dictionaries are distributed under a triple disjoint licensing scheme: GNU GPL version 3 or later, GNU LGPL version 3 or later or MPL version 1.1 or later. You are free to select under which of these licenses you will use it.

Originally Posted by KevinH

If you could only select one (assuming it is compatible with our license) to create a single es.dic and es.aff, which should be chosen?

I would choose the Spanish general dictionary, i.e. the one whose files (es.dic and es.aff) you can extract from the release file named es.xpi. It is the most complete of all of them and has words from all Spanish variations.

[KevinH]

Sounds doable. If there are other Spanish users of Sigil on our forum, I would love to hear what you think about making this change as I have no personal way to evaluate this dictionary.

[d3m0sth3n3s]

As an argument in favor of the change I have proposed, you can read in the README_es_ANY.txt file that accompanies Sigil’s current Hunspell dictionary for Spanish that its author and main developer is called Santiago Bosio.

He’s the same guy hosting the RLA-ES project on GitHub and its original contributor. In fact, the RLA-ES dictionaries provided by this project are an evolution of Sigil’s current dictionary. It is the same dictionary, indeed. Just improved with more contributions by Santiago and other people.

[KevinH]

Given it is an updated version by the same dictionary author, and given the lack of any other feedback, I will go ahead and make that change to Sigil master, early next week.

Thanks for helping to make Sigil better.

[KevinH]

FYI, just pushed this change to new Spanish dictionary to Sigil master. This change will appear in our next release.

[d3m0sth3n3s]

Good to know. Thank you very much!