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Tenders McChiken
Asked: 2019-08-07 00:44:46 +0800 CST

How do I spellcheck Arabic in Gedit?

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How can I spellcheck text files that contain Arabic text? The answer in Adding languages to gedit spellchecker recommends installing a myspell dictionary, but no such dictionary seems to exist for this particular language (at least not in the official apt repositories).

gedit internationalization spell-checking arabic

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Fortunately, gedit does not use one specific spellchecker but instead relies on Enchant, a small utility that abstracts over other spellchecking backends like hunspell, aspell, and many more.

    Since aspell is one of the supported backends, and Arabic aspell dictionaries are available in the repositories, you can install and use those instead.

    More specifically,

    1. Install the necessary dictionaries: In the case of Arabic, run sudo apt install aspell-ar and maybe sudo apt install aspell-ar-large.
    2. After the dictionary is installed, run gedit and click the hamburger menu ☰ (Or press F10). Go to Tools > Set Language... and you should see 'Arabic' among the languages you can choose.

    Once you select it, all spellchecking will be done using the newly-installed dectionary. After you're done with checking Arabic (or if you need to check another language), repeat step two.

    Note: Keep in mind that aspell doesn't seem to be able to handle حركات.

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