The following are notes toward getting started with incorporating Enchant into a Windows application.

Enchant is a spell-checking framework that allows you to use many different spell-checking backends, including Aspell, Hunspell/MySpell, and Ispell.

You can get the source here. Building using MSVC is not difficult once all the dependencies are provided. The full build notes are here.

If you don’t want to bother with building it yourself, you can get the binaries here.

The main library is libenchant.dll. Enchant uses providers (libenchant_aspell.dll, libenchant_ispell.dll, and libenchant_myspell.dll), which are adapters for the various backends. (There are others available but if you want others, you will have to build them yourself.) There is also a .Net binding available (Enchant.Net.dll) that uses libenchant.dll. The Aspell provider only works if you have ASpell installed, while the Hunspell/Myspell provider and the Ispell provider read dictionaries (in the proper format) directly.

By default, Enchant expects to find the providers (the backend adapters) in the subdirectory lib\enchant underneath the location of libenchant.dll.

You can check your setup by running enchant-lsmod.exe. It will list the providers it finds. Run enchant-lsmod.exe -list-dicts to list the available dictionaries.

Next time, I’ll add more about setting up Enchant to use the dictionaries.