Spellcheck install glitch? Perhaps just my fault (but can't yet resolve)

[ArchieLinux]

I recently installed novelWriter 2.5.3-1 from the AUR (Environment: running latest Arch Linux kernel / EndeavourOS / i3wm) and am extremely impressed! But I cannot seem to get the spell checker function to work.

I've confirmed that enchant (actually enchant-2) ,hunspell and nuspell are all installed. Yet I see no options other than "default" listed in the "Spell Check Language" pull down menu.

SYMPTOM: There is no identification of (my intentionally) misspelled words contained in a novel doc while being edited either before or after being saved.

Here's what I've tried thus far in various combinations:

• creating an executable copy of enchant-2 renamed as simply enchant in same /bin location; restarting novelWriter
• editing the novelwriter.conf file's line 54 to change spellcheck = None to spellcheck = enchant or spellcheck = hunspell; restarting novelWriter
• uninstalling and reinstalling novelWriter itself

Have searched whether this issue has been reported separately and see no indication it has, which leads me to suspect I've just got a unique issue - likely of my own making somehow?

FWIW, here's what I see when I try to select a language in the preferences section (i.e., there are no choices shown):

Hopefully I've provided enough detail to narrow things down. Any other ideas to get the spell check function to work would be greatly appreciated!

[ArchieLinux]

Thank you for relocating this as a Help SOS item... I was trying to figure out how to do that myself after realizing this wasn't really a "bug"!

[vkbo]

Hi, I converted this to a Help request in discussions as I don't think this is a bug in novelWriter. I'm not familiar with "enchant-2". novelWriter uses "pyenchant". The list in Preferences is populated from the extension itself. All novelWriter does is wrap the extension in a helper module that is primarily there because there used to be two spell check tools.

Both enchant and pyenchant have been a cause of issues over the years. Partially because they are barely maintained at all. I'm looking for a replacement.

[vkbo]

Creating a virtual env is trivially easy though:

python3 -m venv test_env
source test_env/bin/activate
pip install novelwriter
novelwriter --debug

You may need to use python instead of python3 depending on your distro.

This installs novelWriter in an isolated environment, and you can just delete the folder "test_env" after.

[vkbo]

My point here is that the pyenchant pip package includes all its dependencies, and as far as I remember, also some sample dictionaries, so it should at least reveal if the issue is with your system and what's installed rather than an issue with novelWriter.

You can also run novelwriter --debug from the command line with your current installation, which may print some errors that may help.

[ArchieLinux]

Thank you thank you!

TLDR: My original installation of novelWriter now has what appears to be a fully functional spell check tool. It's working like a charm!

Details for future reference:

I followed the steps you provided above (to install NW in an isolated environment). The spell check function within that instance of NW worked perfectly out of the box (well, technically, in the box). So clearly the missing functionality had something to do with my original installation from the Arch AUR.

I spent a good bit of time trying to compare the various files within each directory of my original installation with the corresponding isolated test_env version - but to no avail. I could not discern anything that was missing from one vs the other. And as far as I could tell, I had the requisite dictionaries and enchant-related plugins installed.

Thinking I'd just try again from scratch, I deleted the ~/test_env directory to start over.

But on a lark, I reopened my original NW install (i.e., from the Arch AUR) and to my surprise I saw that the spell check function worked within that NW instance after all.

I don't know why, since the various spell check tool/dictionaries had already been installed beforehand but apparently something got fixed simply by installing/running the "isolated" instance within the test_env directory.

What's interesting is that - even though the spell check works - when running NW from the command line with the --debug flag, there are indeed warnings about missing spellcheck-related files in two sections of the DEBUG dump, as seen here:

and

While these warnings are not keeping the spellcheck tool from functioning, it is curious... and may suggest how to make the installation on Arch platforms more robust for others going forward?

If nothing else, perhaps this thread will help someone else with a similar issue.

Many thanks again for your prompt and invaluable assistance! Loving NW and hoping to get the children's book for my grandchildren completed soon. 😁

[vkbo]

Glad to hear it worked!

The isolated env should not be able to change the outside system, but novelWriter itself will write its config to the same config file regardless of how you start it, so maybe some settings were corrected. I see you tried to set some values manually in the config file, but they are not supposed to be set to what you suggested.

As for the warnings, there are clearly some issues with libenchant, which is the AbiWord library pyenchant connects to. As you can see form the other log output which is from novelWriter, it both found the pyenchant package and the dictionary, so those were the pieces of information I was curious about.

As you can see, novelWriter outputs a lot of information when in debug mode, so it is useful to check these things when running into issues. I use it quite a lot myself, naturally 😃

Good luck with your book!