This short note shows how to generate Vim's spell file format from the .aff and .dic files that Myspell uses. Myspell is distributed, inter alia, with OpenOffice.org and many Mozilla products. The OpenOffice .oxt files are zip packed archives containing Myspells's .aff and .dic dictionary files. As the Estonian spell file can not yet be downloaded automatically, we will go through the manual compilation and installation of the Estonian spell checker language file.

The below instructions are tested with Neovim; they should however, work with Vim in a similar way.

  1. Download the wordlists:

    Estonian spellchecking and hyphenation | Apache OpenOffice Extensions on the OpenOffice Website.

  2. Unpack them:

    $ unzip ~/Downloads/dict-et.oxt
$ ls
description.xml  dict-et.oxt  dictionaries.xcu  et_EE.aff  et_EE.dic  hyph_et_EE.dic  META-INF  README_et_EE.txt  README_hyph_et_EE.txt

  3. Transcode the word lists:

    In Neovim:

    :mkspell! ~/.local/share/nvim/site/spell/et ~/Downloads/et_EE

  4. Check success:

    The file generation process lasts some minutes. When it succeeds you see:

    Reading affix file ~/Downloads/et_EE.aff...
Reading dictionary file ~/Downloads/et_EE.dic...
Compressed case-folded of 14257651 nodes; 36657 (0%) remaining
Compressed keep-case of 77 nodes; 42 (54%) remaining
Compressed case-folded of 28467478 nodes; 14282249 (50%) remaining
Compressed keep-case of 89 nodes; 81 (91%) remaining
Compressed case-folded of 42646797 nodes; 28490019 (66%) remaining
Compressed keep-case of 89 nodes; 89 (100%) remaining
Compressed case-folded of 56800964 nodes; 42667649 (75%) remaining
Compressed keep-case of 97 nodes; 90 (92%) remaining
Compressed case-folded of 70928410 nodes; 56821483 (80%) remaining
Compressed keep-case of 97 nodes; 97 (100%) remaining
Compressed case-folded of 70928411 nodes; 70928406 (100%) remaining
Compressed keep-case of 97 nodes; 97 (100%) remaining
Compressing word tree...                 
Compressed case-folded of 80559157 nodes; 70941624 (88%) remaining
Compressed keep-case of 97 nodes; 97 (100%) remaining
Writing spell file ~/.local/share/nvim/site/spell/et.utf-8.spl...
Done!
Estimated runtime memory use: 693100 bytes
Press ENTER or type command to continue

    Check the presence and date of the newly generated dictionary file:

    $ ls -l ~/.local/share/nvim/site/spell/et.utf-8.spl
-rw-r--r-- 1 user user 441075 Jul 15 13:32 /home/user/.local/share/nvim/site/spell/et.utf-8.spl

  5. Use the dictionary:

    In Neovim:

    :set spelllang=et
:set spell

For more information, consult Neovim's built-in help:

:help mkspell