Check spelling in an unavailable language 1

WLMail 2011 comes with thirty-odd sets of spelling dictionaries. If you want to check your spelling in a language not shown on the list at Options > Spelling, you may still be able to do it if you have Office (97-2003) Proofing Tools for that language. Office 2007 or later is no good, because the proofing tools work differently. If you don’t have the proofing tools, you may still be able to check spelling. See the next article in this section.

First, you have to know the LCID (MS’s code for different languages and locales) for the language you’re interested in. You can look it up here; note that different flavours of a language (like Portuguese – Portugal and Portuguese – Brazil) have different LCIDs.

Extra spellcheckers are installed in the folder %localappdata%\Microsoft\Windows Live Mail\Proof. On a standard Windows installation, that would be C:\Users\user\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows Live Mail\Proof. In there is a separate folder for each installed language, the name being something like prf00nn. The last two characters of this are the last two of the LCID in hex, so Danish (da-dk) which has language ID 1030 (0406 in hex) would live in prf0006. Inside this folder should be another folder called 1. So, with WLMail closed:

(1) Create these folders using the appropriate name for the prf00nn folder.

(2) Locate your Office proofing tools. On a computer with them installed, they are usually in Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Proof. Otherwise, find them on the program disk.

(3) Locate the spelling engine and lexicon for the language you’re interested in. They are called MSSP3XX.DLL and MSSP3XX.LEX, where XX represents a two-letter code for the the language (like PT for Portuguese). Copy them to your new folder (%localappdata%\Microsoft\Windows Live Mail\Proof\prf00nn\1).

(4) Open Notepad and type in:

[Spellchecker]
Engine=MSSP3XX.DLL
Lex=MSSP3XX.LEX
Lang=nnnn

where XX is the two-letter language identifier and nnnn is the LCID in decimal (like 1030 for Danish).

(5) Save this text file as  spell.ini  (select All files in the Save as dialogue box) in the same folder.

(6) Start WLMail. Check under Options > Spelling that you have selected Check spelling in current input language and Check my spelling as I type. Whilst you’re on that page, you should see your new language shown as Installed.

Then follow the instructions in this article to set up spellcheck in more than one language.