Spell Checker plug-in in HippoEDIT based on Hunspell engine used in such applications as Open Office, Mozilla FireFox, Google Chrome etc. This mean that it is well tested, a highly optimized core with a lot of existing dictionaries.

HippoEDIT tries to get most from Hunspell and use it in the best way as possible. Following features are supported:

• Automatic lookup of the dictionaries from other existing applications (as FireFox or Open Office).
• Support of user dictionaries for new and ignore words
• Automatic recognition of the text to be parsed by spell checker in source code files (as check of comments and strings only)
• Supported of spelling mixed native languages documents
• Recognition of commented source code for reducing false positives on checking
• Interactive and background spell checking
• Suggestion lists for spell error correction

Most common usage of the spell checker is background spell checking. It is activated by default and indicates wrongly spelled words in your document with red squeezes as you type. If spell checker finds duplicated word it indicates the second instance with blue squeezes.

To correct misspelled word you can use context menu where spell checker inserts suggested variants of correction or give you the chance to add the word to user dictionary or ignore the error for further processing.

Spell checker is intelligent enough to recognize text styles and do the check only in comments or strings (it checks styles that have property text set to 1) for syntaxes inherited from DefaultSource syntax (as JavaScript, C++, Pascal etc) and complete text for documents inherited from DefaultText (as Plain text, XML, HTML etc). It can also recognize commented source and do not give you errors in this case.

Another way of checking/correcting of spelling errors is by using of the interactive check.

You can call interactive spell checking as from menu Edit→Spell Check as from Spell Checker ToolBar. As result HippoEDIT will bring you modal dialog, which will lead you through all found errors in the current document.

Here you can:

• Preview context of the error
• Select one of the suggestion from the list and select Change (for single change) or Change All (for change of all matches of same misspelling).
• Change dictionary - select dictionary you want to use. All languages means use all installed dictionaries for checking.
• Ignore current instance of error or all similar errors
• Add word to to user dictionary or
• Add word to Auto Correction. This will result, that all such misspelled matches can be auto corrected in the future, using Auto Correct feature.

If you would like to stop/start background checking, change active dictionary or call interactive checking, you can use Spell Checker ToolBar. If you like to adjust more advanced settings, you need to go to plug-in settings that can be found in menu Tools→Options→Plugins→Spell Checker.

You can select main spell check language or decide to use all installed dictionaries for simultaneous check here. The option All Languages will be available only if you have more than one dictionary installed.

You can also instruct Spell Checker plugin to search for dictionaries installed by other applications (as FireFox or OpenOffice) and use them in addition to ones installed with HippoEDIT. Controlled by option Search dictionaries from other applications.

Link Download more dictionaries will take you to Open Office dictionaries page where you can find dictionary for language you need. To install new dictionary, you need manually download archive with it from OpenOffice web site and unpack it in sub-folder dictionary located in your user directory.
Normally, dictionary contained from two files named like that:

• en_US.dic - dictionary file, with list of words
• en_US.aff - affix file, with optional parameters

both files should be unpacked in dictionary directory.

Following options can control Spell Checker parsing logic:

• Ignore words in UPPERCASE - if On, Spell Checker will skip errors in words written with uppercase.
• Ignore words with numbers* - if On, Spell Checker will skip errors in words containing numbers. * Ignore URL addresses* - if On, Spell Checker will skip checking of URL addresses.
• Ignore file names - if On, Spell Checker will skip checking of file names.
• Ignore words with under_scores - if On, Spell Checker will skip errors in words with under_scores (typical for source code).
• Ignore words in CamelCase - if On, Spell Checker will skip errors in words written in CamelCase (typical for source code).
• Ignore word duplicates - Spell Checker will not mark duplicate words written aside.

By default Spell Checker plug-in uses Auto mode for background spell checking, that means spell checking is On for small documents and Off (disabled) for large documents. The main reason for such Auto Mode - possible performance problems, but you can always switch to On if you do not see any issues.

HippoEDIT will suggest you to download additional dictionaries (by default only English(US) dictionary installed) on initial start up. The decision, which dictionary to suggest based on your installed keyboard layouts and dictionaries available in HippoEDIT on-line repository.

If you need additional dictionaries you can download them explicitly using Update Manager (filter by category Dictionary) or directly from HippoEDIT web site.

Good source of dictionaries is the OpenOffice.org project, which uses the same spelling engine. There is a list of available dictionaries at OpenOffice extensions site from which you can choose language you need. HippoEDIT uses only the spelling dictionaries (files *.dic and *.aff) for each language; to get them, open downloaded zip archive (or rename the downloaded extension file to .zip) and extract the spelling dictionary files (they may be contained in a subdirectory) into <UserDirectory>\dictionaries. Restart HippoEDIT to get new dictionaries loaded.

#performance #plugin