Last Update: Oh good grief. Pidgin spell check works fine and it was an aspell issue all along. The file aspell.exe needs to be in your PATH.
Install Pidgin 2.2.2 and make sure you install the language you need. That will kick off Aspell and the dictionary. Once the installation is done go to the control panel. In Vista it’s “System and Mantenance” then click on Advanced system settings.
Click on Environment Variables and modify the Path environment variable. BE CAREFUL not to mess up that settings as it could do bad things to your system.
When you edit the PATH variable, append to the end of it with a semicolon the path of your aspell.exe. On my system I added to the end “;C:\Program Files (x86)\Aspell\bin\”.
That’s all there is to it.
This is probably documented somewhere but hey as long as it works…
Update: Spell check for Pidgin 2.2.2 (current as I type this) does not work on my installation. I believe the problem is that pidgin is looking for Aspell\bin in the wrong directory but that’s just a guess on my part. If I can get it to work on my Vista 64 installation and reproduce it, I’ll post it here.
In order to get the Windows version of Pidgin spell check working, go to http://aspell.net/win32/ and get the full installer as well as the pre-compiled dictionary.
and then what?
With Pidgin installed (it’s currently at version 2.0.2 from their website) download Aspell for Windows and run the installer. The link to the Aspell installer is here.
For the English language get aspell-en-0.50-2-3.exe
and run that installer too. If all goes well then you should be able to launch Pidgin and when you misspell words a red zig zag line should appear underneath it.
Hope that helps,
Jan Dembowski
To explicitly state what is lacking in the post:
Pidgin uses the GTK system to handle its spell checking. What you do is install the aSpell system for GTK, and then Pidgin should just automatically pick up on it. I’m not getting little red zigs just yet tho.
Chris,
That is true: Pidgin uses gtkspell 2 per pidgin’s website.
Since I have switched to Vista 64 I have no longer been able to get Pidgin to work with spell check. Aspell works fine; I think that I’m having gtkspell issues.
I’ve been busy but I’ll try to take a hard look at getting it working this weekend and will post the results here.
Jan Dembowski
All fixed now. It was a PATH issue, see updated blog entry above.
The bin file is not available when I attempt to add the path “C:\Program Files\Aspell\bin\”. I have “dict” and “data” to pick from and spell check does not work with either one. Any suggestions?
Have you been able to locate aspell.exe?
On your system where ever aspell.exe was placed, that’s where you want to add your path.
Once the path to aspell.exe is added, open up a Command Prompt just type aspell.exe and hit return.
If you get the aspell help text then you should be good to go.
If you don’t get the aspell text, try uninstalling pidgin and re-installing with default options turned on.
Hope that helps,
Jan Dembowski
I downloaded the lastest version of pidgin which is currently 2.4 and that resolved whatever the issue was. I should note that before I did the new install I removed all of pidgin and aspell (deleted registry). I had tried that in the past and just re-installed the older version of pidgin but had no success.
Thanks,
I’m glad that solved the problem.
I’ll download the new version tonight and kick the tires and see if any new features got added.
Even easier: On XP I noticed that if I just downloaded the latest Pidgin installer, ran it again and when the “Choose Components” part came up, I
chose “English” in the list under “Spellchecking Support.”
Tim,
Cool; next time I re-install XP (happens to often) I’ll just run the installer selecting that option and without setting the PATH.
como podria hacer para que este genial traducor funcione en msn live?, gracias.
Ricky,
As far as I know, the translation function is not available for MSN Live. I use software on my blog to produce translated versions of my pages.
You may want to search Google for MSN Live translations.
Thanks,
Jan Dembowski
Using Google Translate (I apologize for the bad Spanish):
Ricky,
Por lo que sé, la traducción función no está disponible para MSN Live. Uso de software en mi blog para producir versiones traducidas de mis páginas.
Si lo desea, puede buscar en Google para MSN Live traducciones.
Gracias,
Jan Dembowski
Just came across your post. The fix worked for me. Many thanks. I only use Pidgin because of the spell checker and it wasn’t working on my Vista 64 until I implemented your fix.
Anyone know how to get Hebrew spellcheck working on Windows?
I am currently running Pidgin 2.5.8 on Windows XP. English spellcheck works fine.
The Pidgin installer did not offer Hebrew as one of its spellcheck language options.
An Aspell dictionary tarball for Hebrew (and for many other languages!) is available at ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/aspell/dict/0index.html .
However:
[1] this is meant for Aspell 0.60 — not the version 0.50.3 that gets installed with Pidgin for Windows.
[2] a lesser problem is that no Windows installer is available for this dictionary, in contrast to the installers available at http://aspell.net/win32/ .
So, maybe the question becomes: has anyone published a Windows installer for the latest version of Aspell — currently 0.60.6 ?
How do you make the spell check case insensitive? I tried putting
‘ignore-case true’ in “c:\program files\aspell\aspell.conf”.
‘aspell dump config’ says it’s there, but pidgin still says ‘ok’ is wrong.
Tam, Sorry for not getting back to you. I’ve never tried modifying the aspell.conf file, so I’m not sure what the problem might be.
Is this still relevant as of Pidgin 2.7.0, where they have changed to OpenOffice dictionaries? I still can’t get my spell check working.