Support Linux system spell checking dictionary

Feature requests
1

Use case or problem

Obsidian doesn’t provide up-to-date French spell checking, it provides the same shitty one that Google didn’t care enough to update (Chromium issue number 403772455); and doesn’t provide one for Esperanto.

In practice, that means I disable spell checking because it’s unusable in my use case, which is a bit annoying considering it’s an app I use for writing.

Proposed solution

Allow me one way or another to use the system provided spell checking dictionaries under Linux, be it the Hunspell or .bdic ones.

Current workaround (optional)

I installed dictionaries (including one Estonian that will serve for Esperanto instead) and I do (I’m on Arch Linux):

ln -s /usr/share/qt6/qtwebengine_dictionaries/en_US.bdic ~/.config/obsidian/Dictionaries/en-US-10-1.bdic
ln -s /usr/share/qt6/qtwebengine_dictionaries/fr_FR.bdic ~/.config/obsidian/Dictionaries/fr-FR-3-0.bdic
ln -s /usr/share/qt6/qtwebengine_dictionaries/de_DE.bdic ~/.config/obsidian/Dictionaries/de-DE-3-0.bdic
ln -s /usr/share/qt6/qtwebengine_dictionaries/eo.bdic ~/.config/obsidian/Dictionaries/et-EE-3-0.bdic

Then restart Obsidian. I have no idea how well it’ll survive updates (I suppose 3-0 and 10-1 are version numbers?).

3 Likes
2

It’s a bit sad that you can’t use installed dictionaries and I can’t seem to find much information about what format they need to be in. So, are those Google Chrome files? I’ve barely used Chrome or Chromium, but it seems like they don’t even have an Irish dictionary, despite the fat tax breaks.

Really frustrating that Obsidian can’t use the installed one.

3

OK, so I figured out what .bdic format is, got the converter, converted the regular hunspell files, put them in ~/.config/obsidian/Dictionaries but Obsidian still ignores them (no matter what they’re called).