Gaelic Spellchecking for Mac OS X [v1.0]

Background

You may (or may not) be aware that the (Scottish) Gaelic development agency, Bòrd na Gàidhlig, worked with The European Language Initiative (TELI) and Microsoft to produce a new Gaelic spellchecker for Microsoft Office. This is called the Dearbhair and is a free download, which uses a large GOC-compliant database (constantly revised and expanded by TELI).

As a Mac user I was keen to see this tool available on Mac OS X and began exploring ways of achieving this.

Downloads

My current solution is in two parts:

• install cocoAspell, a free tool developed by Anton Leuski
• install a version of the TELI dictionary which I've compiled and packaged for Leopard and Tiger (Intel and PowerPC)

cocoAspell extends the Mac OS X spellchecker and allows new language dictionaries to be installed (provided they are packaged in the correct aspell format). This is what I've done (the second download) with the TELI dictionary. The package is for Leopard and Tiger versions of Mac OS X only.

Download both packages -- in order -- and follow the instructions. This process should be fairly painless. Once you've enabled the Scottish Gaelic dictionary you can use it within any app that uses Apple's built-in spellchecker.

This is a newly-released dictionary package, so please note and report any problems.

However, before you contact me you might like to read the spelling FAQ I've put together.

NB. You may have to close and re-open a software package (especially Mail) after you've changed the dictionary language for the change to take effect. This is an annoying bug which Apple are aware of and will hopefully fix shortly. Update: in my newly-installed Snow Leopard it appears that Apple have fixed this bug! Spellchecking your Gaelic emails just got a whole lot easier!

OpenOffice.org 3

The above method will not work for OpenOffice.org 3 on the Mac. If you need OpenOffice Gaelic spellchecking, however, don't despair: the solution for you is even easier than the cocoAspell one outlined above.

• Download this file: gd_GB.oxt
• Open the Extension manager (from the Tools menu of any OpenOffice document) and install the oxt file as an extension
• Now, from the Language submenu of the Tools menu you can select Scottish Gaelic as a language!

Best of all, there is no need to restart OOo to get the language change to take effect.

Again, please note that this is a new dictionary package, so please report any problems. (Don't forget to check the FAQ, of course.)

New! I created a short video to show how to install and use the gd_GB.oxt file as several people were having difficulty getting it to work. It's not the most exciting vid you'll ever see but it might help you.

Disclaimer

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.