Latvian or non-standard spell-check on Safari and other Mac applications.
Latvian spell-check issue is gone at Mac (partially). Thank to the Normunds and “Power of Google”.
Great feature of browser – spell-check. Firefox provides support for different non-standard languages, latvian support is available there too, but remember – the point is to use Safari.
So Firefox is not a solution, MacOS provides support for standard widely used languages (ok, probably languages of the countries, where Apple products are very popular). The nice thing is that spell-check is not hardcoded to any applications, but it works for applications like web-browser, text-editors, etc. The bad thing there is no Latvian, even Leopard does not have Latvian localization (like support for Russian and Polish localization is added), but it is not a big surprise, really.
Luckily, there is a solution, the bad fact that used dictionary is old, but it contains words to check-spell anyway and you can educate it.
Software cocoAspell is the key to our problem. Aspell software installation is very easy, installing dictionaries process asks more resources.
1. First of all you have download it, link for Intel Macs.
2. Installation process is on GUI, that’s why only read instructions and use ‘Next’ button.
3. After successful installation go to ‘System Preferences’ of your Mac, there should be new menu ‘spelling’, it does not contain correct dictionaries yet.
4. Different languages dictionaries are available to download, there is not only latvian, but a lot of different languages. I’m not sure about the dictionary freshness.
5. Most likely dictionary file will be archived, you have to de-archive it, then place files into the /Library/Application Support/cocoAspell/ directory.
6. Go to ‘System Preferences’ —> ‘Spelling’ and select language you need, Latvian my case.
7. Restart Finder, go to the ‘Force Quit’ menu, ‘Relaunch’ button is provided for ‘Finder’ application.
8. To enable your language spell-checking on the specific application. ‘Right-click’ on the text editor program Window —> ‘Spelling’ —-> Select your Dictionary.
That’s all folks, enjoy spell-checking feature.
This is absolutely fantastic but how exactly do I de-archive the dictionary folder?
Actually pretty much by step 5 im lost…i dont understand where to find the force quite menu or relaunch command for finder
Jessica,
Have you been successful to de-archive dictionary ?
Restart finder steps are the following,
1) search for Apple icon (top-left corner)
2) There should be ‘Force Quit’.
3) There you will Finder.
4) Click on Finder, there will be Relaunch.
Good luck.
Yes, I figured it out, I realized there is a utility compressor already in Leopard I can use to unzip files. Sometimes the Aspell application is screwy when I need to change languages or my selections of which languages I want do not register, but it gets the job done. Thank you so much!!