Yes! If the installer isn’t able to successfully download and install the dictionaries, you can do so manually.
First, upgrade to the newest release if you aren’t on it!
Pidgin on Windows uses the dictionaries available from the OpenOffice.org
Extensions Download
Site.
You need to download the appropriate language extension file(s). These files
are OpenOffice.org extensions named with a file extension of .oxt; these are
simply ZIP files with some extra data in them. Once you have downloaded one of
these files, you can rename it to have a .zip extension and then extract the
*.dic and *.aff files in it. These files need to be placed into
%PIDGIN_INSTALL_DIR%\spellcheck\share\enchant\myspell\. Create the
directories if they don’t already exist. (%PIDGIN_INSTALL_DIR% is usually
C:\Program Files (x86)\Pidgin or C:\Program Files\Pidgin.) If Pidgin is
already running when you place the dictionary files, you will need to restart
Pidgin for it to recognize the files.
Absolutely! The Offline Pidgin installer has a “silent” mode accessed with the following syntax:
pidgin-x.y.z-offline.exe /DS=1 /SMS=0 /L=1033 /S /D=C:\Pidgin
The /S flag activates the silent mode for the installer. The /L flag
specifies the language using Windows LCID, and this affects both the installer
and Pidgin itself. The /DS and /SMS flags enable (=1) or disable (=0)
the desktop shortcut and Start menu shortcuts, respectively. The /D flag
specifies the installation directory. If you wish to use this flag, it must
be the last argument specified on the command line and may not contain any
quotes, even if the installation path includes spaces. All flags are optional,
except /S if silent mode is desired. Omitting the other flags will default to
LCID 1033 (English), with Desktop and Start menu shortcuts enabled, and a
default install path of %PROGRAMFILESx86%\Pidgin\ or %PROGRAMFILES%\Pidgin
depending on your version of Windows.
The installer will, if necessary, download and install the GTK runtime, which is needed for Pidgin to run. If you need to use a proxy server to connect to the Internet, it is possible that the Pidgin installer will not be able to reach the resources it needs. The installer automatically checks for proxies configured in Internet Options. If you know the proxy settings, you can configure them by opening Internet Options directly from Control Panel, or by opening Internet Explorer and selecting Tools > Internet Options > Connections > LAN Settings.
Alternatively, and likely preferred if errors occur, you can download the offline version of the installer
It is possible using old versions of Pidgin and GTK, but we do not support this. Don’t do it.