Croatian (or any foreign language) spell check and dictionary

"Dictionary.app has absolutely nothing to do with spell checking."

Quite so.

I continued digging after posting the Q and also found out about all the languages with spell check lists as seen in the "Spelling & Grammar" dialog as you described above.

Do you know where these spell check lists live on the HD? I know that when you add words to a spelling list they wind up in ~/Library/Spelling but I am struggling to find the original spelling lists.

The reason I ask is because I want to either add a new one or edit an existing one by adding a croatian word list I downloaded from the web. This would create the Croatian spell checker I desire.

I found a nice pref pane called Dictionary Cleaner that allows easy editing of the files in ~/Library/Spelling. Sadly I can only enter one word at a time which is useless if I want to import a whole dictionary! http://www.twoamsoftware.com/

I also found a Macworld article that describes a manual process of editing these files with TextWrangler but this is also too slow (altho if I could work out a way to 'Find & Replace' invisible characters (carriage returns for upside-down question marks) then this might work). http://www.macworld.com/article/52357/2006/08/editspell.html

Could you devise a way for me to copy all of my txt wordlist file into either the original spellcheck files that ship with OSX or the ones you create in ~/Library/Spelling ?

Thanks Tom from Flagstaff. You rock.

PS MS Office 08 does not have a Cro dictionary after all! That also needs to be made from a wordlist. I have however found clear documentation for this process so its under control. But I'd still like a solution for native OS X apps.

The problem appears to be the Croatian dictionary not working. CocoAspell's English dictionaries work as does the French one I downloaded. The Croatian dictionary appears to have issues.

Find the dictionaries here:
http://people.ict.usc.edu/~leuski/cocoaspell/installdict1.4.html

thanks

As a matter of fact I found the working Cro dictionary at the same ftp link you provide above shortly before you posted it. Nevertheless your great efforts are fully credited. Thanks for your excellent assistance!

I have also been in contact with the developer of Dictionary Cleaner who tells me the 2.0 verison of his software will be able to import comma separated txt wordlists. Nice.

Good as CocoAspell is I feel Apple should already have integrated this functionality, together with downloadable dictionaries from their site, into OS X.

I was unable to get a working Cro dictionary, or Custom dictionary, working in Office 08 for Mac. Interstingly the windows veriosn of the product offers the full gamet of proofing and spelling tools for the Croatian language (and manay, many others).

So both Apple and Microsoft are guilty of letting down their International customers. I am unimpressed by both. How difficult would it be for Apple to add better sprell checking and MS to port their proofing tools for office to the Mac version.

For the record (and MBU developers): When you change the language in Office 2008 for Mac to Croatian (and prob many of the other languages in the list) ALL the spell checking stops and any Custom Dictionaries are ignored.

Switching back to English restores spell checking but then the Custom Dictionary is opened with Roman text encoding and all the special letters in the Croatian alphabet are ignored, thus rendering the Custom Dictioanry list only 30% effective since 70% of the words in the language contain special characters.

The develoepr of Dictionary Cleaner should consider these sorts of problems regarding the text encoding of word lists.

Finally I'd just like to mention the confusing nature of Croatian text encoding:
The 'input menu' tab of the international System Preference pane would seem to imdicate Croatian is Unicode. Although encoding text files in Unicode-8 mangles the characters. As it does too using another text encoding called Croatian (Mac OS). The encoding that actually works is Central European (Windows Latin 2). Go figure.

If anybody knows anything about the subject of text encoding I'd love to know more. Useful links also welcome 🙂

So in conclusion - Come on Apple!, sort it out with interbational sprell check.

p.s. more downloadable non-English dictionaries for Dictionary.app too please!