Spellchecking on mac

[Bagro]

I'm having some issues with spellchecking on mac. I basically don't see any languages and cannot therefore get any spellchecking help. This is in the downloaded release. If I clone the repo and run it from there I get all the installed languages, I have even verified it with the commit for release 2.7.5. I guess it is something simple but just cannot figure it out. Any ideas?

[vkbo]

I have no way of debugging the Mac release, but maybe @Ryex does?

[vkbo]

By the way, did this change with 2.7.5? Did it work with earlier versions?

I don't think 2.7.5 did something different in terms of the spell checking dependency from the other 2.7.x releases at least. It's been hard coded for a while to a version that is supposed to work with M1.

[Bagro]

This is the first time trying novelWriter, but I did test 2.7.4 with the same result before trying to run it from code. What I unsure of is if there is some permissions that need for the downloaded version? I know that running your own code usually have less permission issues.
Can also add that I have it working fine on CachyOS.

[vkbo]

The spellchecking is handled by pyenchant, and depends on the enchant library itself being available. It should be included in the DMG, and should detect OS-installed dictionaries. I am not sure what can go wrong in the detection since it's handled entirely by the library. I don't have a Mac myself (the build scripts was a contribution), and the VM I used before no longer works, so debugging is tricky. Could there be some issues with architecture perhaps?

In any case, it should work fine on Linux. novelWriter is developed on, and primarily for, Linux.

[Bagro]

Unsure how to debug application packages on mac. But I'll just continue to run it from the code on the mac.

[vkbo]

Sure. You can also pip or uv install it from PyPi. In the current main branch uv run novelwriter also works.

If you use the source for writing, be careful when running from the main branch as this is the latest development version. It has all the latest features, but it is not guaranteed to save a project file that can be read later. This rarely happens, but sometimes there are bugs. The stable releases are all made from the releases branch.

It would be nice to understand what's going on with the Mac image. I'm considering flagging the releases for Mac as experimental since I cannot verify or debug them. This project really needs an active maintainer of those releases.