Windows 7: Cannot find dictionary for en_US

[cynicated]

With the spell-check plugin enabled, and even toggled multiple times, I cannot get any form of spell checking.

Checking through the console logs, I found the following line:
spell-check:en-us Can't load en_US: Cannot find dictionary for en_US.

I am running Windows 7 Enterprise, with Atom 1.11.1.

I've verified that English (United States) is selected as my localization.

[dmoonfire]

I thought that error message was only in the 1.12 branch. Is there a chance you have spell-check-test installed?

[lucascosti]

+1 for this. Also getting no spell checking and the console shows
spell-check:en-us Can't load en_US: Cannot find dictionary for en_US.

Running Atom 1.11.2 on Fedora 23, installed using the RPM directly from Atom. I don't have spell-check-test installed.

It is working fine in v1.10.2. Anything from 1.11.0 onwards has this issue.

[lucascosti]

@dmoonfire after doing some hunting, for my situation (linux) I think the problem may be this line:

https://github.com/atom/spell-check/blob/master/lib/system-checker.coffee#L62

On my system (Fedora 23), the dictionary files are in /usr/share/myspell/, not /usr/share/myspell/dicts.

[dmoonfire]

@cynicated: I've duplicated this one on of my Windows machines (Windows 7) but not on my Windows 10 machine. There is a chance the probelm is in the core library we use but I need to investigate it further before I can say for sure. Windows spellchecking is... different from the others in that it doesn't point directly to .dic files but uses the built-in spell-checking.

@lucascosti: Awesome. You should be able to put it in the "Locale Paths" of the settings for spell-check and have it work. If it does, it just means I need to add it to the standard search paths. I do think it is a separate issue from this one, would you be willing to open a new issue and CC me? I think this one won't take long to push (unlike the one above).

Thank you both.

[lucascosti]

Thanks @dmoonfire, I didn't know there are now a lot more options in spell-check now! (as a tech writer, known words will be especially useful for me :))

Adding /usr/share/myspell/ to the new locale paths setting got it working for me. I'll open a new issue as requested to get that added to the standard search paths.

[dmoonfire]

@lucascosti: Thank you. You might also check out my spell-check-project which creates a project-level known words dictionary. That could be useful for specific library and technical names that only apply to a single project. (This is also the entire reason I wanted to do #120).

[dmoonfire]

@cynicated: As a possible work-around, you could download the en_US.dic and related files to a simple path (say C:\dicts) and then set the path manually in the spell-check settings.

[cynicated]

@dmoonfire: No, I don't have spell-check-test installed.

However, your suggestion of just downloading a dictionary package did seem to get things working for now. Thanks!

[corsen2000]

@dmoonfire I followed your suggestion and it did get spell checking working, but it is now flagging all plural forms of words as invalid. For example solution is a word, but solutions is not.

I downloaded both en_US.aff and en_US.dic from https://github.com/atom/node-spellchecker/tree/master/spec/dictionaries.

Any ideas?

Thank you.

[dmoonfire]

@corsen2000: Make sure it is en_US.aff and not en_US.aff.txt. Even though I renamed it, Chrome insisted on putting the .txt at the end of it which causes it not to load. Also, I was getting "solutions" as an error until I did rename it (and then change a setting to force a reload).

Alternatively, you can download Hunspell's dictionary at https://sourceforge.net/projects/hunspell/files/Spelling%20dictionaries/en_US/ which may give you better results. Again, make sure it is .dic and .aff, otherwise spellchecker can't find it.

[corsen2000]

@dmoonfire thanks for the tip. I was not able to get the node-spellchecker files to work, even trying what you suggested. Swapping in the Hunspell versions did fix the issue though.

[BugZappr]

I downloaded a fresh install of Atom, and ran into this issue too. With some searching, and the above thread, I located my dictionaries in "C:\Users\User1\AppData\Local\atom\app-1.11.2\resources\app.asar.unpacked\node_modules\spellchecker\vendor\hunspell_dictionaries". I tried setting this path in settings, no go. I downed the dics at the above alternative link into "C:\dics", checked use locales, and set mine to en_US, and it worked. I set mine back to the above long path in "C:\Users", and it worked. It seems it works if the above path is set, the locale is set, and it is told to use locales.

[dukebarman]

I have a same bug on Windows 7 too