@Peter-Oates said in Dictionary plugins:
However, it does not tell you what to do if the app cannot/will not create the folders it requires.
I must also admit that I find Windows folder / file permissions an almost impregnable forest
The latter causes the former issue.
Assuming that the user knows how to deal with Windows OS permissions is not an unreasonable assumption, since you have to deal with them to do a normal Notepad++ installation. For the vast majority of users, whatever process they take that allows the Notepad++ installation will be sufficient to allow the plugin to work correctly – in all the complaints about DSpellCheck, this is the first time that I remember seeing permissions issues be the cause of the problem.
Every once in a while, a Notepad++ user will find that, because of their non-standard, personal customizations of the OS and/or UAC settings and/or Notepad++ and/or the combination, something weird happens with permissions in the user’s AppData (which is what I’m guessing happened to you). But given how infrequent the reports are here, I don’t think it’s a highly common situation.
I suppose the plugin author could put a note in his README and/or Online Manual to explain that “if you follow all the steps for installing a Hunspell dictionary, and it doesn’t show up, you should chcek the permissions on your %AppData%\Notepad++\Plugins\Config\ hierarchy” or similar – you could even put in a request for the author to do that – but I wouldn’t have necessarily expected a plugin author to have realized that such a comment would be necessary, since AppData permissions issues are reasonable rare.
And even if the author had already documented that, you have admitted that you wouldn’t’ve seen the note on your own or even gone looking for it when you had a problem. So is it really worth the effort for a plugin developer to note that edge case – even if they know about it – when the people who run across that edge case are not likely to try to look up the documentation for it anyway?
For the documentation that I work on, including Notepad++'s manual itself and FAQs for this forum, I most likely would, once it was pointed out to me, because I like to pretend that at some point, people will figure out how to look for documentation; but I don’t know that I expect other people to waste their time in the same ways I waste my own time.
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update: Rereading my post, I guess I could say, since it’s a permission issue, I would have expected the plugin to have received an error from the OS when it tried to write the dictionary to the right folder, and they could have popped up a dialog informing you… I’m actually surprised there wasn’t one. So either the OS was silently erroring out (in which case the plugin cannot do much if the OS doesn’t admit to the failure), or the plugin author was trying to shield you from error messages or something. But it would be a good idea for somebody (you) to put in a request for the plugin to check the status of the dictionary download/install, and if they cannot write it, to let you know about the problem.