Creating a hunspell dictionary for use as spellcheck in Open Office

• Cool! OpenOffice uses hunspell as spellchecker. This means that it is possible to create your own wordlist and affix file for your language, if that doesn't exist. Well, for papiamentu - Curaçao's native language - such dictionary doesn't exist. But I had a hard time finding out how to create such files, so I am documenting it here...


• Installing hunspell on Ubuntu 8.04
  Of course, you need hunspell installed. I am sure you had that already, and if not, the following might help:
  
  sudo apt-get install hunspell hunspell-tools
  
  
  


• The wordlist
  A wordlist is just a list of words. It's the base for the dictionary. A wordlist can have 8000 words, or 100.000, or whatever seems reasonable for your language. Papiamentu has about 30.000 words at the moment.
  Here's a very simple example wordlist:
  
  love
  lover
  lovers
  beer
  beers
  office
  open
  opened
  chair
  
  
  Save that lists as wordlist, just for now. Make sure there's a newline at the end of the file or else that last character will be eaten!
  
• The Dictionary File
  A dictionary file is just a wordlist preceded by the number of words. So this will make a dictionary file (sorted, too, and duplicates removed):
  
  wc -l wordlist > yourlang.dic
  sort wordlist | uniq >> yourlang.dic
  
  
  


• How to create the Affix File
  An affix file is ehmm... quite complex. It took me a couple of hours to understand that it can just be an empty file... if you have a relatively small wordlist (let's say less then 100.000).
  Create an empty affix file:
  
  touch yourlang.aff
  
  
  
• In the Right Place
  On Ubuntu 8.04, the dictionaries are kept in /usr/share/myspell/dicts/. So copy our language there:
  
  sudo cp yourlang.* /usr/share/myspell/dicts/
  
  
  


• Testing the Hunspell
  
  hunspell -d yourlang
  
  
  This should give you a prompt. Enter a word and you will see a result:
  
  Hunspell 1.1.9
  love
  *
  
  
  
  This means, that the word 'love' is spelled correctly according to your language.
  Now try a non-exsiting word:
  
  bove
  & bove 1 0: love
  
  
  This means that 'bove' is not a word, but 'love' comes close.
  


• More Affixion
  You got to read the manual on the affix file format. Here is a less comprehendable but more comprehensive one. Just a small example:
  
  SET UTF-8
  
  SFX P Y 1
  SFX P 0 s
  
  
  It says the rule 'P' adds an 's' behind a word without removing any characters. It's a totally bogus rule for the english language, but it'll work fine with our example dictionary.
  I also added the SET UTF-8 because in papiamentu, my accents got garbled.
  


• Munch the .dic and the .aff
  Munching will apply the affix rules to the dictionary, and produce a smaller dictionary. In fact, it will replace 'lover' with 'lover/P' and remove 'lovers'. One word less. Because the rule will discover these two words and decide that it's more efficient to use 'lover/P'. It'll also remove 'beers' and replace 'beer' with 'beer/P'. Munching will also add the wordcount at the beginning of the .dic file.
  
  munch yourlang.dic yourlang.aff > yournewlang.dic
  mv yourlang.dic yourlang.dic.old
  mv yournewlang.dic yourlang.dic
  sudo cp yourlang.* /usr/share/myspell/dicts/
  
  
  Now test it again:
  
  
  hunspell -d yourlang
  Hunspell 1.1.9
  love
  *
  
  lover
  *
  
  lovers
  + lover
  
  
  
  Ah! 'love' and 'lover' as expected, and 'lovers' has 'lover' as base.. that's what the '+' means. But remember, for small wordlists, the affix file can be empty!