This is supposedly to be the last of the Beta versions of WLW before a final one is released. There are a few changes over Beta 2, most notably where the program gets installed.

More information about switching dictionaries

If you already followed my post about changing the dictionary to a UK English version you may be interested in this article in which the author has done what I wish I had found time for – a follow up on Graham’s work to find those other language files and perhaps a clue as to the engine being used here.

I’ll do a follow up post about the UK dictionary switch once I have Beta 3 installed.

Spread the word :

As several people have pointed out, Windows Live Writer (WLW) Beta comes with an American English dictionary by default. This is frustrating as it means I end up adding lots of things to my custom dictionary which I should not really need to do. I have also commented that it would be nice if it could look for and use (and share) my custom dictionary from MS Office. Why do I keep having to add my surname and street (for example) to a dictionary for every application? Isn’t it about time someone started using an Open format for dictionaries (maybe XML based like everything else these days)?

How to swap the US dictionary for a British one

In this blog post Graham Chastney describes how to swap the ssceam.clx file for sscebr2.clx. Interestingly my install has ssceam2 – perhaps a version number based on the fact I am running Beta2?

Anyway, his instructions are simply to swap the *AM*.clx file for a downloaded *BR*.clx file in Program Files\Windows Live Writer\Dictionaries by copying in and renaming, and essentially this works. The .clx file contains all kinds of clever dictionary things such as valid word endings, and this fixes all the -ised, -ising problems and so on. My recommendation is to rename the files by appending .us (rather than .old) so that it is more obvious which is which if you do want to swap between them.

However, what Graham neglects to mention is that the associated .tlx file is a list of 1000+ words including lots of the roots like color / colour so you really need to swap this too if you want to fix all of the spelling “mistakes”. If you leave this alone, then both “color” and “colour” will be accepted as correct spellings. This may suit you or you may prefer (as I do) to show US spellings as incorrect in which case you need to swap the .tlx file as well.

Swapping the files out without renaming causes WLW to fail at startup, and there seems to be no way to have more than one dictionary used “live” nor to choose a language in the GUI. Maybe there is some undocumented reg hack to set which one to use, but there is nothing obvious as the only value under the Live Writer key is to indicate the install path.

Why is Live Writer written like a bad third-party application?

EDIT: OK, this was simply wrong. After a couple of comments below I went back and checked. It was my mistake, I had been chasing something down and had my virtualised filestore open and switched windows while I was swapping dictionaries around. I screwed up. The user dictionary is in the roaming part of the profile, which is a really great place for it to live and exactly where I would want it to be kept. The whole of this paragraph is hereby stricken from the record. I apologise to readers for confusion and to the developers for the accusations.

Bad Adam – back in my box!

Incidentally, I find it really odd that WLW acts like a legacy application on Vista and stores the custom user dictionary in a virtualised folder …What happened to “eating your own dog food”? Bad dog, Microsoft – back in your box.

Spread the word :