Dictionary plugins

Virginia Chapman

I’m looking for dictionary plugins for Hebrew and Arabic. Any plugins available for right-to-left languages?

PeterJones

The DSpellCheck plugin (available through Plugins > Plugins Admin), which is the standard spell check plugin for Notepad++, has both Hebrew and Arabic available through the default Hunspell library:

Install DSpellCheck:
- Plugins > Plugins Admin
- checkmark ☑ DSpellCheck
- click Install
- Notepad++ will restart
Configure DSpellCheck:
- Plugins > DSpellCheck > Settings
- Confirm it’s on the default Library: Hunspell
- Click Download
- checkmark ☑ Arabic and ☑ Hebrew (Israel)
- click Install Selected
- select the correct Language: pulldown value to activate the appropriate dictionary (or select Multiple Langauges and then checkmark all the languages that you want active at the same time)

Peter Oates

I have just followed the instructions posted above (but selected the language English UK rather than Hebrew and Arabic), but nothing has appeared in the Hunspell sub-directory. What do I do now?

PeterJones

@Peter-Oates ,

Were there any error messages or anything? Are you sure you didn’t miss one of the steps? Can you show screenshots of the dialogs during each of your steps?

Peter Oates

@PeterJones

Hi,

Thanks for your reply.

I have managed to get the plugin working by creating the required folders manually and copying files from another device with the plugin installed. I think the problems were caused by permissions creating the required directories.

As a more general comment the procedure is not user friendly. All squeezed into a small dialog box and no real indication of what you’re doing or trying to achieve. It’s probably ok if you’re one of the cognoscenti but for us lesser mortals it is at best confusing, At worst, you’re likely to give up on the application.

However, I do like using Notepad++ - the best text editor I’ve used for webpage creation.

Thanks again

Peter Oates

PeterJones

@Peter-Oates said in Dictionary plugins:

As a more general comment the procedure is not user friendly. All squeezed into a small dialog box and no real indication of what you’re doing or trying to achieve. It’s probably ok if you’re one of the cognoscenti but for us lesser mortals it is at best confusing, At worst, you’re likely to give up on the application.

I’m not the author of the plugin, just a user.

The author did try to help, by providing Plugins > DSpellCheck > Online Manual to open the online manual for the plugin, but I understand that nearly everyone just skips documentation, despite the fact that everyone knows (at least subconsciously) that no interface is going to be 100% intuitive to 100% of the people; to publically expect 100% intuitiveness without reading the documentation is unfair to the author.

As an aside: There are huge numbers of users of DSpellCheck plugin in Notepad++, and in all my years in this Community, I have only seen a handful of people ask about it. I recognize that the number of people who ask is much less than the number of people who have problems, but I tend to mentally model it as there are thousands of people who have made accounts here, and millions of users of Notepad++, so I assume there are about 1000 real users who have similar problems for every 1 user who asks a question here. Which means that there are a few thousand users out there who, like you, couldn’t figure out how to install the dictionary properly, compared to the millions of users. Which isn’t great… but, compared to millions of users, even a 1% failure rate ain’t bad for something as complicated as the dictionary plugin.

If you think there are improvements that can be made to the User Interface , you could inform the plugin author via his issues page .

Peter Oates

@PeterJones

I must admit that I didn’t go to the documentation - I’ve just looked at it and it seems to be quite comprehensive. My fault for not looking at the time.

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 and I failed to solve the permissions problem in this instance. However, I did manage to create the folders and transfer files from another installation and it seems to be working fine and finding my mistyping.

Thanks for your attention

Peter Oates

PeterJones

@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.

–

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.