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Old 05-07-2005, 07:28 AM   #1
mark hunte
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British English Spellcheck And Dictionary

A tip from Hayne in another post , helped me with an issue of finding where to change the spell checking from US English to British English.

yeee.

I can now type realise and colour without getting told it wrong. What a relief

So
Issue 1,
Anyone Know how to set Spelling to 'British English' globally as opposed to having to do it in each app.

That's globalisation

Issue 2,
Now that I do not get spelling prompts for words like globalisation
If I want to use the dictionary or thesaurus, It does not find them and asks did I mean globalization,
So anyone know how to fix this
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Old 05-07-2005, 06:38 PM   #2
bramley
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Quote:
Originally Posted by mark hunte
Issue 1,
Anyone Know how to set Spelling to 'British English' globally as opposed to having to do it in each app.

Umm, if you are setting it in one app then you are setting it globally - or should be - I am here.
Quote:
Originally Posted by mark hunte
Issue 2,
Now that I do not get spelling prompts for words like globalisation
If I want to use the dictionary or thesaurus, It does not find them and asks did I mean globalization,
So anyone know how to fix this

I have been wondering about this myself. The dictionary is a version of the New Oxford American Dictionary (NOAD) as produced by Oxford University Publishing. According to their website they also do British English versions but only for PCs. The strange thing is the same website claims there are no Mac compatiable versions of NOAD either - which is obviously not true.

I had a look in the dictionary (it's at /Library/Dictionaries/) and see it's in XML format. The validation DTD for the dictionary led me to this website: http://oup.dataformat.com/doc/OUP_DTD_Dictionary.html which implies that the dictionary is not really Mac-compatiable but for Gentoo Linux. So back at the main OUP site, I looked for Gentoo Linux versions of the dictionaries - and so far have still drawn a blank.

If anybody can shed any more light on this please do so.
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Old 05-08-2005, 02:25 PM   #3
mark hunte
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Quote:
Umm, if you are setting it in one app then you are setting it globally - or should be - I am her

I had to set it in Safari and then Found I had to also set it in TextEdit

Quote:
I have been wondering about this myself. The dictionary is a version of the New Oxford American Dictionary .............................

Thanks for going to the trouble, I do hope there is an answer..
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Old 05-08-2005, 02:49 PM   #4
bramley
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I have just checked and it would seem that different spelling engines are possible in different apps.

I'm sure that didn't happen in Panther - I used to have a script to toggle between American and English spellings and if I used it, it always changed the default spelling engine for the system. Maybe in Tiger this is on a by-app preference.

In fact on my system I see that although I have British English settings in every app, I have a global setting of "en" Curious.

I can see no way of setting a global setting except to type the following in a Terminal window:-

Code:
defaults write -g NSPreferredSpellServerLanguage "en_GB"
You will probably need to logout/in to see if the change has taken place.
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Old 05-08-2005, 03:37 PM   #5
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its annoying that when ever you buy a mac you have to de-americanise it.
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Old 05-08-2005, 04:52 PM   #6
mark hunte
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Nice one Bramley, That worked great. thanks for that..

Last edited by mark hunte; 05-08-2005 at 04:55 PM.
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Old 05-16-2005, 06:39 AM   #7
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Have you tried going to menu Apple > System Preferences > International > Language (tab), clicking on the button reading "Edit list…", enabling "British English", hitting OK, and dragging it to the top?

Among other things this list affects the priority of the language to be used in the UI of all applications, if each particular applications has any of the localizations to those languages, or what language encodings are prioritized by Apple Mail. Mybe it affects too default spelling dictionary…
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Old 05-16-2005, 06:50 AM   #8
elmimmo
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Quote:
Originally Posted by bramley
The validation DTD for the dictionary led me to this website: http://oup.dataformat.com/doc/OUP_DTD_Dictionary.html which implies that the dictionary is not really Mac-compatiable but for Gentoo Linux. So back at the main OUP site, I looked for Gentoo Linux versions of the dictionaries - and so far have still drawn a blank.

But surprinsingly, the first line of the second paragraph in that document says "Below is an example of the basic structure of a NOAD entry" (New Oxford American Dictionary, I guess), which is intriguing…
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Old 05-16-2005, 05:06 PM   #9
rgray
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Canadian English, too...!!!!!

Do this

Quote:
Originally Posted by bramley
......... in a Terminal window:-

Code:
defaults write -g NSPreferredSpellServerLanguage "en_GB"
You will probably need to logout/in to see if the change has taken place.

and this

Quote:
Originally Posted by elmimmo
..........going to menu Apple > System Preferences > International > Language (tab), clicking on the button reading "Edit list…", enabling "British English", hitting OK, and dragging it to the top?.......…

have the same result?

If one doesn't stop one's scroll when one reaches "British English", one discovers, a little further down, Canadian English.....

And, as I discovered, there is now "Canadian" keyboard in Tiger (and NOT that 'Canada CSA' crap which is still there), although the icon is pretty crappy compared to the Maple Leaf I found (eventually) through ehmac.ca.... (more on that later).
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Old 05-16-2005, 07:09 PM   #10
elmimmo
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Quote:
Originally Posted by rgray
Do this and this have the same result?.

I have no idea. That's what I was suggesting you to find out. I am Spanish! and have no interest whatsoever in favoring one English or favouring the other. So default is fine for me.
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Old 05-17-2005, 09:43 AM   #11
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Canadian English

Quote:
Originally Posted by elmimmo
I have no idea. That's what I was suggesting you to find out.

I tried it with Candian English via the International preferences routine and it appears to work across multiple applications: worked with Text Edit, Pages, Mail, (but not AppleWorks which I think has it's own dictionary).

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Old 05-17-2005, 12:35 PM   #12
bramley
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Changing the language setting in International has no effect on which global spelling server language is in use. If you think about it, changing the spelling engine in this way would be a bug. Type the following command into a Terminal window before and after changing the default language and no change in the spelling server will be shown:
Code:
defaults read -g NSPreferredSpellServerLanguage
What Mark pointed out and I confirmed was that changing the spelling language in a "Spelling" window no longer affected the global value, and one had to change each application separately - behaviour that differed from Panther. After upgrading to 10.4.1, I discovered that closing the document window in which I had changed the spelling engine did change the global value. I do know whether this is a fix, or whether I did not close a document window when I tested this last week. It is also possible this was default behaviour under Panther, and I had forgotten exactly how it worked.
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Old 05-17-2005, 01:57 PM   #13
elmimmo
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Quote:
Originally Posted by bramley
If you think about it, changing the spelling engine in this way would be a bug.

Agreed, but that should set the default spelling engine when none has been chosen yet.
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Old 05-25-2005, 02:32 PM   #14
RHigginbotham
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Dictionary Format

Quote:
Originally Posted by bramley
I had a look in the dictionary (it's at /Library/Dictionaries/) and see it's in XML format. The validation DTD for the dictionary led me to this website: http://oup.dataformat.com/doc/OUP_DTD_Dictionary.html which implies that the dictionary is not really Mac-compatiable but for Gentoo Linux. So back at the main OUP site, I looked for Gentoo Linux versions of the dictionaries - and so far have still drawn a blank.

The dictionary's native format is not oriented to Gentoo Linux or any platform. (This is the point of using DTD and XML.) Only files which have executable binaries are platform-oriented. The availability of the dictionary is whether you have a reader to parse the dictionary for your platform according the the specified formats.
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Old 05-25-2005, 06:07 PM   #15
elmimmo
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Quote:
Originally Posted by RHigginbotham
Only files which have executable binaries are platform-oriented.

There is one binary file in each dictionary bundle, though. It's not executable, but what it is about is not so clear and open as the xml and dtd are. I think it would be nice to know what each file does and how one can mimic their structure in order to make custom dictionaries, or translate dictionaries from other open sources to whatever Mac OS X 10.4 is using.

The dictionary bundle has the following contents:
dict_body -> The full dictionary in xml format.
- dictionary_1 -> A binary file. Viewing its contents seems to be like some sort of table of contents.
- Images -> A folder of image files linked from the xml file dict_body
- Info.plist -> A "preference list" file describing, among other things, the name and system-wide identifier of the bundle.
- PkgInfo ?? Both bundled dictionaries have this text file the contents of which is simply the word "dictlam"
- version.plist A "preference list" file stating the revision number of the dictionary

So the only obscure file seems to be dictionary_1. Does anyone know what it is about, and how one creates one for a custom xml dictionary?
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Old 06-11-2005, 02:49 PM   #16
variante4
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Quote:
Originally Posted by elmimmo
So the only obscure file seems to be dictionary_1. Does anyone know what it is about, and how one creates one for a custom xml dictionary?

As it seems to be an index, I wonder if the the app "Help Indexer" (Dev Tools) may be useful. (Help files are XML, arn't they?)
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Old 06-11-2005, 04:43 PM   #17
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It does look like an index indeed, the first few bytes say

dictL,com.apple.DictionaryAccessMethod.ForwardTrie

Google didn't know anything about com.apple.DictionaryAccessMethod but perhaps someone here does.

It would be great to create wikipedia-based-dicts in different languages for example.
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Old 06-11-2005, 10:55 PM   #18
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I wouldn't be too surprised if it turned out that the "dictionary_1" file would get created automatically (if it didn't exist already) the first time you ran the dictionary app. I.e. I am guessing that it might be just a cache of a lookup data structure (hence the "trie").

I tried removing the "dictionary_1" file and then running Dictionary and it worked fine, both for lookups and spell-check (assuming that this is the dictionary used for spell-check). And the file wasn't re-created. So I am assuming this means that the file was read into memory upon startup (or login) and so will not be needed again until the next startup (or login). But I'm not ready to logout to test this theory right now.
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Old 07-02-2005, 04:21 AM   #19
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10.1 Other XML dictionaries

Peeps,

After learning from this thread that the dictionary application in Tiger is based on xml & dtd, I googled "xml dtd dictionary" and found this:

http://www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com/...atabases.shtml

I thought the "Other Associated Files" column of the spreadsheet might be useful to those attempting to reverse engineer the NOAD bundle.

Peace,
7.

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Old 07-02-2005, 06:57 AM   #20
JayBee
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Quick thing to note

Try typing in "colour" or "cheque" and running a dictionary spell check on it... you DO get a note about british spellings. Not ideal, but it's enough for me
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