spell checking and TeXworks

Question

When I use TeXworks there is no automatic spell checking. If I go Edit -> Spelling, the only option I have is none

How can I enable spell checking?

Thanks for your help

Solution 1

There is a section of the TeXWorks manual in which there is the reference to a guide on how to use dictionaries.

The link it refers to is this, so you should place your personal dictionaries in the folder /usr/share/myspell/dicts.

One easy way to add them is to install them. I suppose that if you use LibreOffice then they are installed by default. If not, you can simply install the packages named myspell-XX, where XX stands for your language.

You can easily find them with apt-get and auto-completion or via Synaptic.

Solution 2

In case you already have LibreOffice installed, the en_US.aff and en_US.dic files are already on your system in the /usr/share/hunspell folder. In this case, just symlink these two files into /usr/share/myspell/dicts and you are done:

sudo ln -s /usr/share/hunspell/en_US.dic /usr/share/myspell/dicts/
sudo ln -s /usr/share/hunspell/en_US.aff /usr/share/myspell/dicts/

You can do so for all dictionaries you find in /usr/share/hunspell.

Restart Texworks afterwards.

You can see Texworks > Edit > Spelling > Unites-States now. Click it.

Also change Texworks > Edit > Preferences > Editor > spell-check-language > English-United-States.

You are done after restarting.

Comments

[Anake]

Thanks, I had actually seen that but I already had a bunch of dictionaries in that directory. However apt-get'ing the same dictionary I normally use fixed the problem magically!

[MycrofD]

I tried this. But still it doesn't show up in my spelling sections.

[MycrofD]

You can please share this answer in tex.SE (for others' benefits) here : tex.stackexchange.com/q/235313/52071

[dadexix86]

@MycrofD not sure, that question is for Windows :)

[MycrofD]

Oh I see. My bad. And yes my problem was solved only after I installed as you said.. and then I had to symlink the respective files..as solved below by @SPSJNU2006-2014

[not-a-user]

It's 16.04 and I still have to manually create these links...

[Christopher K.]

I again came across this issue in Ubuntu 18.04. My TeXworks did offer the de-lu instead of the de-de language for no good reason. When I uninstalled the myspell-de-de package and marked the hunspell-de-de package as installed manually (to avoid it gets uninstalled together with the myspell-de-de package), the issue was solved. So it seems nowadays, better get rid of the myspell-**packages. The package description in Ubuntu 18.04 says it can be safely removed.