I need to decrypt a dictionary file from a program that’s no longer supported

Looking for Software
1

I’m using Topstyle, an old unsupported program, to write HTML code. It works great and manages 300 website pages.

The spellchecker, made by Dynip, is no longer supported since the company is going out of business and isn’t responding to non-client emails. They used to sell a dictionary editor for this spellchecker, but both the editor and spellchecker are long discontinued.

I need to edit the dictionary used by the Dynip spellchecker. Since I can’t reach Dynip, my options seem to be:

  1. Use a tool to decrypt the dictionary so it can be edited.
  2. Find someone who has the old Dynip dictionary editor.
  3. Locate someone who can still contact Dynip to help me out.
2

Or reverse engineer the file format.

3

That’s a problem. The file format isn’t readable. I need a program that can analyze the data and figure out what simple algorithm was used to encrypt it. Do you know of any?

4

Are you sure it’s even encrypted? Have you checked it with a hex viewer? It might just be a zip-compressed SQLite file or something similar. If you can share a sample, I can take a look at it.

5

Thanks for the suggestion. I’m looking into the file to figure out where it came from.

6

To reverse engineer the software, start with a disassembler like IDA Free. If you can analyze the code while it’s running, you might figure out if the file is encrypted or how it reads the file format, which could help you figure out how to edit the file. Then, you can use this information to build your own editor, either with Visual Studio Community Edition or another language/compiler system you’re familiar with. Just be ready to invest a lot of time into this. If you have more money than time, you might want to hire a developer for the project, but make sure to set clear deadlines in the contract to avoid delays.

7

Oops, I made a mistake. The dictionary editor Dynip was selling was actually a Python tool called Addict, which is available on GitHub. The company that made it is out of business now.

I’m retired and don’t have any Python experience. The downloaded file is a .whl file, so it might take me a while to figure out how to unpack and use it.