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Using Enchant in a Windows App: Getting Started

Author admin

The following are notes toward getting started with incorporating Enchant into a Windows app.

Enchant is a spell-checking framework that allows you to use many different spell-checking backends, including Aspell, Hunspell, and Ispell.

You can get the source here.Building using MSVC is not difficult once all the dependencies are provided. The full build notes are here.

If you don’t want to bother with building it yourself, you can get binaries here.

libenchant.dll is the main library. It uses backend adapters for the providers: libenchant_aspell.dll, libenchant_ispell.dll, and libenchant_myspell.dll to proxy spell checking requests. (There are others available but if you want others, you will have to build it yourself.) There is also a .Net binding (Enchant.Net.dll) that can sit on top of libenchant.dll. libenchant_aspell.dll only works if you have aspell installed as well. If aspell-15.dll is not in your path, you must specify the dll file location in the registry key: HKCU or HKLM \Software\Enchant\Aspell\Module

By default, the providers (the backend adapters) are put into the subdirectory lib\enchant underneath the location of libenchant.dll

By default, you put dictionaries (like ispell and myspell) into the user’s appdata\enchant\[Provider Name] where [Provider Name] is MySpell or ISpell (But aspell get’s its dictionary from its installation location)

You can check your setup by running enchant-lsmod.exe. It will list the providers it finds and the dictionaries as well.

I’ll add more later.