Sigil newbie dictionary questions

[michaelbr]

I'm trying to add en_US, en_GB and Spanish dictionary to Sigil, I'd like to know where can I find tutorial showing how/where to add dictionaries to Sigil.

Sigil 1.2.1 in Linux (MX Linux 19.3)
path for hunspell_dictionaries: /home/Michael/.local/share/sigil-ebook/sigil/hunspell_dictionaries/
ps: I've found some sites saying that default dictionaries are already installed, but my installation doesn't have any (hunspell_dictionaries dir is empty).

questions:
1) what's a reliable site to download free hunspell_dictionaries?
2) which files should I download/copy to hunspell_dictionaries?
3) if I install dictionaries with different languages, will there be filename conflict (same filename for different languages?)
4) did I make mistake during install (for the default dictionaries not showing)?

[DiapDealer]

If the /usr/share/sigil/hunspell_dictionaries directory is empty, then it would appear that the maintainers of the Sigil Ubuntu/Mint package(s) for Sigil are debundling the default dictionaries that are normally installed when building Sigil with the default settings.

I'm assuming, of course, that you installed Sigil from your software repository and didn't build Sigil yourself. Is the dictionary combobox (Sigil preferences) truly empty? If so, then they've probably opted to let Sigil use system-supplied hunspell dictionaries instead. At least I HOPE that's what they've configured Sigil to do. That's what we've provided Arch and Debian mechanisms to do.

If that's the case, you would just need to install the hunspell dictionaries you want from your distro's software management system.

apt-get install hunspell-en-us hunspell-en-gb

The location you indicated (in your home directory) is where additional user supplied dictionaries would go. If my above solution doesn't work, that is where you'll probably need to put the dictionaries someone else will need to tell you how to manually find/download.

[DiapDealer]

However, I see that you probably wouldn't have Sigil 1.2.0 if you installed Sigil via Mint 19.3's package management system. So if you built Sigil yourself from scratch: the default dictionaries would have been installed in /usr/local/share/sigi!/hunspell_dictionaries.

The only reason they wouldn't be is if you configured the Sigil build with the cmake -DINSTALL_BUNDLED_DICTS=0 option when preparing to build.

Perhaps we should just start with how you went about installing Sigil 1.2.1 on Mint 19.3.

Never mind. Just noticed you said MX Linux and not Mint. My bad. Even though I have no personal experience withs MX Linux, my previous post should still be applicable. If you have no dictionaries after installing Sigil with your package management system, then install the hunspell dictionaries you want with your package management system.

[michaelbr]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

I'm assuming, of course, that you installed Sigil from your software repository and didn't build Sigil yourself. Is the dictionary combobox (Sigil preferences) truly empty? If so, then they've probably opted to let Sigil use system-supplied hunspell dictionaries instead. At least I HOPE that's what they've configured Sigil to do. That's what we've provided Arch and Debian mechanisms to do.

Thanks so much for your reply, indeed, I'm not that familiar with Linux, so I used the repository to install it.

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

If that's the case, you would just need to install the hunspell dictionaries you want from your distro's software management system.

apt-get install hunspell-en-us hunspell-en-gb

The location you indicated (in your home directory) is where additional user supplied dictionaries would go. If my above solution doesn't work, that is where you'll probably need to put the dictionaries someone else will need to tell you how to manually find/download.

Great, thanks for this tip, I'll give it a try.

[michaelbr]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

Even though I have no personal experience withs MX Linux, my previous post should still be applicable. If you have no dictionaries after installing Sigil with your package management system, then install the hunspell dictionaries you want with your package management system.

Thanks again for your tip, it's much appreciated, I'll give it a try.

[DiapDealer]

No problem. Please let me know if you still have trouble. From what I can gather, MX seems to be some sort of Debian variant. I've worked with Sigil's debian maintainer a bit in the past, and he's certainly aware of how to configure Sigil to use the system hunslell libraries. So I'm fairly certain you will be able install the hunspell-en-us, -en-gb, and -es--xx packages to achieve what you want.

If I get some time, I'll try to set up a virtual MX machine and verify.

[DiapDealer]

With a fresh install of MX 19.3 I ended up with Sigil 1.3.0 from the Buster backports repo (using the MX package manager). en_US and en_GB were already available in Sigil's spellcheck dictionary preferences. When I installed the hunspell-es package, all of the Spanish variant dictionaries became available for selection in Sigil's spellcheck preferences.

So the package version of Sigil is behaving as expected when the maintainer de-bundles the spellcheck dictionaries and relies on system dictionaries instead. All you should need to do is install the additional dictionaries you want using the MX package manager.

[michaelbr]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

With a fresh install of MX 19.3 I ended up with Sigil 1.3.0 from the Buster backports repo (using the MX package manager). en_US and en_GB were already available in Sigil's spellcheck dictionary preferences. When I installed the hunspell-es package, all of the Spanish variant dictionaries became available for selection in Sigil's spellcheck preferences.

So the package version of Sigil is behaving as expected when the maintainer de-bundles the spellcheck dictionaries and relies on system dictionaries instead. All you should need to do is install the additional dictionaries you want using the MX package manager.

Thanks so much for your time trying out, I just installed using the Popular Apps tab, which contains an older version, upgraded to newer one and installed the dictionaries as indicated. Your help is much appreciated.

[DiapDealer]

No problem. Glad to hear you got it going.

I was a little sad to see that the Debian Stable repo is still at Sigil 0.9.13, though. They've got Qt5.11.x and Python 3.7.x, so there's nothing really holding them back. I suppose it's the whole QtWebEngine debate holding them up. But at least it's pretty easy to get a much newer version from the Stable Backports repository!