Mystic BBS Wiki

Note: Instructions and files needed can also be found on the Downloads page of the website:

http://www.mysticbbs.com/downloads/mystic_spellcheck_v2.zip

Mystic BBS's full screen message editor has the ability to perform on-the-fly spell checking and word suggestions.

While a user is entering a message, Mystic will perform checks on their typing and will highlight misspelled words and make suggestions to help guide the user to a correct spelling all in real time as they type. With the simple press of a hotkey, Mystic will pop up a list box of suggested words where the user can select the correct word. Mystic will then take the selected word and change the spelling in the actual message.

Mystic's spelling engine allows for multiple dictionaries to be loaded together, so if you have Spanish as your primary language, you can also load a dictionary of English words at the same time.

Mystic allows a custom dictionary file in plain text that can be used to easily add common words to any dictionary that is loaded regardless of its language. This can be very useful to include various BBS terms or acronyms which may not be found in an actual dictionary.

Mystic uses the Hunspell engine to assist in the capabilities described above. Hunspell is the same engine used by many very well known products such as macOS, Open Office, FireFox, and Chrome to name a few. Because of its wide usage, there are many existing dictionaries available for many different languages and dialects of languages.

If English is your native language, then you will easily find dictionaries for US, Canadian, UK, and Australian dialects of English. The same holds true for many languages.

In order for spell checking to enable, Hunspell must be installed and at least one dictionary must exist in Mystic's data directory. This section covers the installation of the HunSpell library.

Windows:

Copy appropriate .DLL into root Mystic directory or system lib path.  Note
that the 32-bit version of Mystic requires the 32-bit version of Hunspell,
and the 64-bit version of Mystic requires the 64-bit version of Hunspell.
 
For the 32-bit version, Mystic will be looking for libhunspell32.dll and
for the 64-bit version, Mystic will be looking for the libhunspell64.dll.
 
Copy the appropriate .dll into the root Mystic directory or somewhere else
in your Windows system that is configured in a way that will allow Mystic to
find it on startup.

Linux:

In Linux, Mystic looks for the existence of "libhunspell.so" somewhere in a
common library path.  For Ubuntu, this could already be installed by default
and Mystic may work out of the box without any installation other than
dictionary files.
 
If this is not true with the distribution you are using then you may need to
install it using a package manager.  For example:
 
	Raspbian Jessie/Ubuntu installation for Hunspell:
 
		sudo apt-get update
		sudo apt-get install libhunspell-dev
 
If the package installed does not already create a symbolic link so that
libhunspell.so exists, then you must create a symbolic link.  First, find
where the file exists:
 
	sudo find /usr -name libhunspell*
 
If you do not see a "libhunspell.so" file then you'll need to create a link
in that name and point it to where the Hunspell library is.  So if the find
above returns "/usr/lib/libhunspell-1.3.so.0" then you'd create a symbolic
link of that file which points to libhunspell.so:
 
	sudo ln -s /usr/lib/libhunspell-1.3.so.0 /usr/lib/libhunspell.so
 
After that you're all set with the Hunspell installation

Mac OSX:

macOS uses libhunspell itself, so every version of macOS comes with hunspell
already installed.  However, this is an older version of Hunspell (1.2.0)
while the current versions are in the 1.4.X iterations.
 
The 1.2.0 version to my knowledge does not support multiple dictionaries
so one may wish to install a later version.  For those who wish to install
the later versions, "Homebrew" can be used:
 
	First update Homebrew to the latest:
 
		brew update
 
	Next install hunspell:
 
		brew install hunspell
 
	To verify it installed type "hunspell --version" on a command prompt, you
	should see it print out a version which is currently 1.4.1.
 
Regardless of if you've just installed Hunspell or you want to use the default
macOS version, you'll need to locate where the Hunspell library is installed:
 
	sudo find /usr -name libhunspell*.dylib
 
Mystic looks for "libhunspell.dylib" which allows the Sysop to create a
symbolic link to whatever version of Hunspell is installed or they wish to
use.  Lets say the search above gives us a location of:
  	
	"/usr/local/lib/libhunspell-1.4.dylib"
 
In order for Mystic to find it, we need to create a symbolic link from the
actual file to the name that Mystic is looking for:
 
sudo ln -s /usr/local/lib/libhunspell-1.4.dylib /usr/local/lib/libhunspell.dylib
 
Once that is done, Hunspell is ready to be used.

After HunSpell is installed, other steps must be followed on the Mystic side to enable spell checking:

Mystic's spell checker requires that dictionary files “dictionary.aff” and “dictionary.dic” exist in the DATA directory. These can be any valid ISPELL or HUNSPELL dictionary file of your chosen language.

These files determine the “primary” language and the language rules that will be applied to the spell checker.

At a minimum, those files need to exist for the spell checker to operate. The default spelling package comes with the “US English” variation of these, so if want to use US English as your primary language, just copy the provided .dic and .aff file into your DATA directory.

If you want to locate additional dictionaries, you can use any ISPELL or HUNSPELL .dic and .aff file. Some web resources available to help you locate new dictionaries are:

http://cgit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice/dictionaries/tree

http://hunspell.github.io

Remember, you only need a .dic and a .aff for the language and dialect you want to use, and only the .dic file for any secondary languages you may wish to use.

Once you have the .dic and .aff file of the primary language you want, then copy them into the DATA directory as “dictionary.aff” and “dictionary.dic” and you'll be ready to go.

There are some additional optional things to know about as well. You probably want to copy the wordlist.txt included in the package into your DATA directory:

This file can exist in the DATA directory and it can contain words that will be added into the dictionary regardless of what dictionaries are being used.

This file is helpful to prevent common BBS related acronyms and the sort of words that would not normally be found in an official dictionary, and the package includes a WORDLIST.TXT already for you with some common terms. This will continued to be built upon as new words are noticed.

Blank lines are skipped and any line that begins with a semi-colon (;) will also be ignored, so that comments can be made in the file if desired.

This optional file contains a list of secondary .dic files that will be loaded after the primary language. This allows works from a different language to be included into the primary dictionary and language rules. For example, you may have a primary French dictionary, with an English secondary word list.

In this file, blank lines are ignored as well as any line which begins with a semi-colon (;). If just a filename (ie french.dic) is referenced, Mystic will look in the DATA directory for the file, but a full directory name can be included here as well. The “@ROOT@” code will be replaced with the root Mystic BBS if it is found, ie: “c:\mystic\”, etc. For example:

	french.dic
	@ROOT@data\french.dic
	c:\mystic\data\french.dic

In the above examples, all three of those lines will point to the same location in the DATA directory.

NOTE: Some versions of Hunspell do not allow multiple dictionaries to be used and when Mystic encounters this situation, only the primary dictionary will be loaded.

By default, nothing needs to be done with the default message editor template (msg_editor.ini), but there are some options to consider within it that relate to spell checking that are worth mentioning:

By default this is set to true, which causes Mystic to wait until the user does not type for around a half of a second before it will try to auto suggest words. However, if you are on a faster system, you may prefer to remove the delay which will cause Mystic to perform instant suggestions. Instant suggestions will require a much faster CPU.

If the spell checker does not show as enabled while editing a message, then read the node's log file for any Hunspell related error messages, and also validate that the dictionary.aff and dictionary.dic files exist in the data folder.

Make sure you are using the proper “bit” version of Hunspell. If you are using a 32-bit Mystic, you need a 32-bit Hunspell and the same goes for 64-bit you need a 64-bit hunspell.