Add a new language or dialect dictionary

You can add support for more languages or dialects to IXIA CCMS dictionary files in the /system/dicts collection.

Two dictionary files per language handle dictionary processing.

  • [language].aff handles the rules, such as hyphenation, prefixes, and affixes, related to the target language
  • [language].dic contains a word list for the target language

At least one default language dictionary already exists.

Important: Make configuration changes in a test environment and confirm they work before copying them to a production environment.
Note: The abbreviation used for renaming the dictionary in the following procedure must match the language setting, such as xml:lang="en-us", within the prolog of a map or topic.

To add a new language or dialect dictionary:

  1. Locate the source of a Hunspell dictionary for a language or dialect.
    A popular resource for the Hunspell dictionaries can be found on SourceForge. Go to: https://github.com/wooorm/dictionaries, and then click Clone or download > Download ZIP.
  2. Open the downloaded zip file, and choose the appropriate language folder.
  3. Transfer the index.aff and index.dic from that folder to your local system.
  4. Rename the index.aff and index.dic files so that they are identifiable as a separate language or dialect. The folder the files are derived from provides the language code you should use.
    For example, if you were adding the German dictionary, you could rename index.aff and index.dic to de-de.aff and de-de.dic. If you are adding a dialect, such as British English, you could rename the files to en-GB.aff and en-GB.dic instead.
    Note: The name of these files should follow a 4-letter convention similar to the ISO 639-2 language codes to describe each language, followed by the dialect. You must use same case for your filenames to match that of xml:lang within the map and topic templates.
  5. Within TEXTML Administration, go to /system/dicts.
  6. Right-click on dicts, select Insert documents.
  7. Click Add file, select the two renamed dictionary files located on your system, then click OK.
  8. Place a second copy of these files in the /system/dicts/customs collection, which allows you to add additional, customized words for that language.
  9. Open the renamed [language].dic on your local system.
  10. Select all of the content within the file, and delete it. Replace it with 0 in the first line of the file, followed by a carriage return. The content of the file should look like the following: 
    0

    This tells the system that there are zero lines to read from in this file. This automatically increases as writers add new terms to the dictionary.

  11. Save the modified [language].dic file.
  12. Within TEXTML Administration, go to /system/dicts/customs.
  13. Right-click on dicts, and then select Insert documents.
  14. Click Add file, select the two renamed dictionary files located on your system, then click OK.
  15. Within TEXTML Administration, go to /system/conf and open languages.xml.
  16. If the new language/dialect is not present, add the following lines, where [language] equals the 4-letter code used by the xml:lang within the topic templates: 
    	<language groups="[language group name]" name="[full name of language or dialect]">
		<code type="ISO-639-1">[language]</code>
		<code type="ISO-639-2/B">[language]</code>
	</language>

    For more information on the [language group name] and [full name of language or dialect], examine the other examples within this file, or review the ISO-639-2 code list, available from: loc.gov/standards/iso639-2/php/code_list.php.

    Note: When you add a new, active language to this file, users automatically receive a prompt to choose the language when creating a new map or topic. The user's selection is expressed in the xml:lang for that map or topic.
The dictionaries you added are now active.