As you may know all too well, Apple’s Mac OS X doesn’t offer native support for Romanian spellchecking—that’s a shame, Apple, a shame!

However, there is a way to install a Romanian dictionary available to all applications that use system spellchecking services, like Mail, TextEdit, Safari, iChat, Adium and loads of others, but not those applications that use their own spellchecking engines, like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Illustrator, InDesign or Freehand.

Prerequisites

Mac OS X 10.3.9 and higher.

Step 1. Install cocoAspell

Action: Go to cocoAspell homepage and download the adequate installer: for PowerPC if your machine is older, for Intel if you have a MacBook or MacBook Pro laptop or other Intel-based machine. The package will install GNU Aspell distribution, a Spelling preference pane to control cocoAspell and an English dictionary (not mandatory for our purpose).

Outcome: If all goes well a Spelling preference panel has to appear in System Preferences.

Step 2. Get and install the Romanian dictionary

Action: You can either click here to download and then run the little application I wrote to make this process easier (downloads and installs the 0.50-2 version of the dictionary package for you) or you can do it yourself by opening a Terminal window and running the following commands:


Step 3. Enable the dictionary

Opening the System Preferences > Spelling panel will require Aspell to compile the dictionary. You should get the following message:



And then:



Consequently, Romanian should appear in the Spelling panel's dictionaries list:



In order to use the newly installed dictionary, you need to select it in your spelling preferences. In you application of choice select from the menu bar: Edit > Spelling > Spelling...:



After selecting the Romanian dictionary, the spelling engine should switch to Romanian.

Final notes

· Please note that this tutorial is provided 'as is', and I'm not responsible should any data loss occur—a backup first is always a good idea. If in doubt, consult maintainer's installation instructions, f.a.q. and troubleshooting pages.
· Both InstallDictionary.app—the program I wrote—and the script apply only for the 0.50-2 version of the dictionary package. To install other versions—when (and if) they'll become available—you'll have to refer to the maintainer's instructions and install it manually.
· The dictionary is far from being up-to-date and it seems that it wasn't updated since 2001 or 2002 or maybe even earlier. We can only hope that an update version will appear soon, although I'm not very optimistic in this regard.