Hi,
A friend reported to me today that spell-checking in gedit was broken on their Fedora 17 desktop live cd install. After some searching around on the web, they figured out a workaround: installing enchant-aspell.
To me, it seems like a bug to ship with broken spellcheck. There seem to be issues with both gedit and AbiWord:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=825449 https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=750981 https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=771089 https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=818995
It looks like the dictionaries were pulled out of the spin when the ISO was just squeezing under size limits to save space: https://fedorahosted.org/spin-kickstarts/browser/fedora-livecd-desktop.ks
I don't think we're that space constrained today, are we? The spell checking packages (to support English) seem to only be a couple megs compressed. I'm wondering, since the live cd spin is only focused on English-speaking users anyway (IIRC only English translations are available on it), would it be worth considering shipping the English dictionaries to save space yet still have functioning spell check?
It's also pretty unclear how to add dictionaries should you discover they aren't there (maybe some packagekit integration needed?): https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=750986
Or perhaps not installing/enabling spell-check in gedit by default since it doesn't work by default? :-/
Anyway, this looked to me like it's been a problem for a few releases now, across multiple bugs and apps, so I thought this might be a good place to point it out.
Thanks, ~m
On Wed, Aug 1, 2012 at 5:49 AM, Máirín Duffy duffy@fedoraproject.orgwrote:
Hi,
A friend reported to me today that spell-checking in gedit was broken on their Fedora 17 desktop live cd install. After some searching around on the web, they figured out a workaround: installing enchant-aspell.
To me, it seems like a bug to ship with broken spellcheck. There seem to be issues with both gedit and AbiWord:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=825449 https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=750981 https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=771089 https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=818995
It looks like the dictionaries were pulled out of the spin when the ISO was just squeezing under size limits to save space: https://fedorahosted.org/spin-kickstarts/browser/fedora-livecd-desktop.ks
I don't think we're that space constrained today, are we? The spell checking packages (to support English) seem to only be a couple megs compressed. I'm wondering, since the live cd spin is only focused on English-speaking users anyway (IIRC only English translations are available on it), would it be worth considering shipping the English dictionaries to save space yet still have functioning spell check?
No, this is wrong, the Desktop spin livecd contains translations for all languages we support.
It's also pretty unclear how to add dictionaries should you discover they aren't there (maybe some packagekit integration needed?): https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=750986
Or perhaps not installing/enabling spell-check in gedit by default since it doesn't work by default? :-/
Anyway, this looked to me like it's been a problem for a few releases now, across multiple bugs and apps, so I thought this might be a good place to point it out.
Thanks, ~m
-- desktop mailing list desktop@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop
On Tue, 2012-07-31 at 22:49 -0400, Máirín Duffy wrote:
Hi,
A friend reported to me today that spell-checking in gedit was broken on their Fedora 17 desktop live cd install. After some searching around on the web, they figured out a workaround: installing enchant-aspell.
To me, it seems like a bug to ship with broken spellcheck. There seem to be issues with both gedit and AbiWord:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=825449 https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=750981 https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=771089 https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=818995
aspell should be a red herring here.
So..., gedit has a spell plugin (/usr/lib64/gedit/plugins/libspell.so) which links to enchant, and enchant defaults to including the hunspell plugin (with the aspell plugin an optional extra) so hunspell libs are presumably pulled in. So it must be the case that the hunspell-en dictionaries are not installed.
i.e. if anyone has the problem then presumably rpm -q enchant hunspell succeeds, and rpm -q hunspell-en fails ?
I'm going to assume that it's that problem, and marked most of these as duplicates of https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=573516 and there's a testing update of hunspell-1.3.2-5.fc17 now
It's also pretty unclear how to add dictionaries should you discover they aren't there (maybe some packagekit integration needed?): https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=750986
It might be nice to have a spell(:lang=XX) provides in rpm to enable prompting and auto-install of dictionaries for a language if missing and spelling is requested, e.g hunspell-en installed, but locale is de_DE and spellchecking in gedit/libreoffice is activated => hunspell-de (or German Support Collection) is suggested for installation.
I duped the rest of the bugs that are along those lines together as https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=750986 e.g. do something similar to http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/AutoFontsAndMimeInstaller except for spell checking
FWIW yum install hunspell-LANG should work in practice for most languages. And if you use add/remove software and go to package collections, and grab e.g. "French Support" one should get the spellchecking, hyphenation, thesaurus etc stuff for French.
Though this is a bit messy in the add/remove software UI at the moment. It would be nicer to break out the language support collections from the generic "Collections" bucket into a toplevel category of its own.
C.
Caolán McNamara (caolanm@redhat.com) said:
It's also pretty unclear how to add dictionaries should you discover they aren't there (maybe some packagekit integration needed?): https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=750986
It might be nice to have a spell(:lang=XX) provides in rpm to enable prompting and auto-install of dictionaries for a language if missing and spelling is requested, e.g hunspell-en installed, but locale is de_DE and spellchecking in gedit/libreoffice is activated => hunspell-de (or German Support Collection) is suggested for installation.
The yum-langpacks plugin will pull in the proper dictionaries when hunspell is installed if you're installing in a particular language - where we fall down a bit is how to handle the 'I want to install language support later" case.
Bill
On Wed, Aug 1, 2012 at 6:59 PM, Bill Nottingham notting@redhat.com wrote:
Caolán McNamara (caolanm@redhat.com) said:
It's also pretty unclear how to add dictionaries should you discover they aren't there (maybe some packagekit integration needed?): https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=750986
It might be nice to have a spell(:lang=XX) provides in rpm to enable prompting and auto-install of dictionaries for a language if missing and spelling is requested, e.g hunspell-en installed, but locale is de_DE and spellchecking in gedit/libreoffice is activated => hunspell-de (or German Support Collection) is suggested for installation.
The yum-langpacks plugin will pull in the proper dictionaries when hunspell is installed if you're installing in a particular language - where we fall down a bit is how to handle the 'I want to install language support later" case.
Maybe we should have a GUI for this in GNOME, under the Language and
Region control panel, that will allow adding or removing spellcheck dictionaries easily via packagekit. (You don't really expect new users to know what hunspell or aspell are, right?)
Bill
desktop mailing list desktop@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop
On Wed, Aug 1, 2012 at 5:21 PM, Elad Alfassa elad@fedoraproject.org wrote:
On Wed, Aug 1, 2012 at 6:59 PM, Bill Nottingham notting@redhat.com wrote:
Caolán McNamara (caolanm@redhat.com) said:
It's also pretty unclear how to add dictionaries should you discover they aren't there (maybe some packagekit integration needed?): https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=750986
It might be nice to have a spell(:lang=XX) provides in rpm to enable prompting and auto-install of dictionaries for a language if missing and spelling is requested, e.g hunspell-en installed, but locale is de_DE and spellchecking in gedit/libreoffice is activated => hunspell-de (or German Support Collection) is suggested for installation.
The yum-langpacks plugin will pull in the proper dictionaries when hunspell is installed if you're installing in a particular language - where we fall down a bit is how to handle the 'I want to install language support later" case.
Maybe we should have a GUI for this in GNOME, under the Language and Region control panel, that will allow adding or removing spellcheck dictionaries easily via packagekit. (You don't really expect new users to know what hunspell or aspell are, right?)
It shouldn't be needed, dictionaries should be installed when a user adds language support, the dictionaries should be part of the language groups. If that doesn't happen there's bugs in out language support in the yum-langpacks plugin or the packaging of dictionaries and they should be fixed.
But from the original mail from Mo it looks like the US dictionaries should be there already.
Peter
On Wed, Aug 1, 2012 at 7:37 PM, Peter Robinson pbrobinson@gmail.com wrote:
On Wed, Aug 1, 2012 at 5:21 PM, Elad Alfassa elad@fedoraproject.org wrote:
On Wed, Aug 1, 2012 at 6:59 PM, Bill Nottingham notting@redhat.com
wrote:
Caolán McNamara (caolanm@redhat.com) said:
It's also pretty unclear how to add dictionaries should you discover they aren't there (maybe some packagekit integration needed?): https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=750986
It might be nice to have a spell(:lang=XX) provides in rpm to enable prompting and auto-install of dictionaries for a language if missing
and
spelling is requested, e.g hunspell-en installed, but locale is de_DE and spellchecking in gedit/libreoffice is activated => hunspell-de (or German Support Collection) is suggested for installation.
The yum-langpacks plugin will pull in the proper dictionaries when hunspell is installed if you're installing in a particular language - where we fall down a bit is how to handle the 'I want to install language support later" case.
Maybe we should have a GUI for this in GNOME, under the Language and
Region
control panel, that will allow adding or removing spellcheck dictionaries easily via packagekit. (You don't really expect new users to know what hunspell or aspell are, right?)
It shouldn't be needed, dictionaries should be installed when a user adds language support, the dictionaries should be part of the language groups. If that doesn't happen there's bugs in out language support in the yum-langpacks plugin or the packaging of dictionaries and they should be fixed.
I think it's a dictionary packaging problem then, cause yum-lungpacks is not related to this. yum-langpacks will install the language support subpackage which is appropriate for your system UI language when you install a package that has one. Therefor I assume this bug is in comps: the dictionaries should be inserted to the relevant language-support category.
But from the original mail from Mo it looks like the US dictionaries should be there already.
Peter
desktop mailing list desktop@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop
Elad Alfassa (elad@fedoraproject.org) said:
It shouldn't be needed, dictionaries should be installed when a user adds language support, the dictionaries should be part of the language groups. If that doesn't happen there's bugs in out language support in the yum-langpacks plugin or the packaging of dictionaries and they should be fixed.
I think it's a dictionary packaging problem then, cause yum-lungpacks is not related to this. yum-langpacks will install the language support subpackage which is appropriate for your system UI language when you install a package that has one. Therefor I assume this bug is in comps: the dictionaries should be inserted to the relevant language-support category.
The language support groups are deperecated and likely to be removed shortly, in favor of the yum-langpacks usage.
Bill
Hi,
aspell should be a red herring here.
So..., gedit has a spell plugin (/usr/lib64/gedit/plugins/libspell.so) which links to enchant, and enchant defaults to including the hunspell plugin (with the aspell plugin an optional extra) so hunspell libs are presumably pulled in. So it must be the case that the hunspell-en dictionaries are not installed.
i.e. if anyone has the problem then presumably rpm -q enchant hunspell succeeds, and rpm -q hunspell-en fails ?
I'm going to assume that it's that problem, and marked most of these as duplicates of https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=573516 and there's a testing update of hunspell-1.3.2-5.fc17 now
So we have this in the desktop spin kickstart file:
# Dictionaries are big -hunspell-*
I guess if you have a Requires: hunspell-en in hunspell you'll win over that, but we should probably fix the kickstart anyway.
--Ray
On Thu, Aug 2, 2012 at 6:38 PM, Ray Strode rstrode@redhat.com wrote:
Hi,
aspell should be a red herring here.
So..., gedit has a spell plugin (/usr/lib64/gedit/plugins/libspell.so) which links to enchant, and enchant defaults to including the hunspell plugin (with the aspell plugin an optional extra) so hunspell libs are presumably pulled in. So it must be the case that the hunspell-en dictionaries are not installed.
i.e. if anyone has the problem then presumably rpm -q enchant hunspell succeeds, and rpm -q hunspell-en fails ?
I'm going to assume that it's that problem, and marked most of these as duplicates of https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=573516 and there's a testing update of hunspell-1.3.2-5.fc17 now
So we have this in the desktop spin kickstart file:
# Dictionaries are big -hunspell-*
I guess if you have a Requires: hunspell-en in hunspell you'll win over that, but we should probably fix the kickstart anyway.
So we will have hunspell-en in the livecd, but what if someone changes the UI or input language (this is a good reason for dictionaries to be a special case, you need them when you add input language, not UI language) they won't get the related dictionary. Could we get the control panel install the relevant dictionary using PackageKit when you add a keyboard layout? eg. if I add Arabic it should install hunspell-ar so I would have spellcheck when typing in Arabic. This will make using Fedora (and GNOME in general) easier for multilingual beginner users.
--Ray
-- desktop mailing list desktop@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop
Hey,
So we will have hunspell-en in the livecd, but what if someone changes the UI or input language (this is a good reason for dictionaries to be a special case, you need them when you add input language, not UI language) they won't get the related dictionary. Could we get the control panel install the relevant dictionary using PackageKit when you add a keyboard layout? eg. if I add Arabic it should install hunspell-ar so I would have spellcheck when typing in Arabic. This will make using Fedora (and GNOME in general) easier for multilingual beginner users.
Totally agree that's a good idea. I filed this:
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=681084
so that suggestion doesn't get lost.
--Ray
Hi,
So we will have hunspell-en in the livecd, but what if someone changes the UI or input language (this is a good reason for dictionaries to be a special case, you need them when you add input language, not UI language) they won't get the related dictionary. Could we get the control panel install the relevant dictionary using PackageKit when you add a keyboard layout? eg. if I add Arabic it should install hunspell-ar so I would have spellcheck when typing in Arabic. This will make using Fedora (and GNOME in general) easier for multilingual beginner users.
Totally agree that's a good idea. I filed this:
Two other loftier thoughts:
1) maybe spell checking dictionaries should get install "just in time" when the library is used, just like fonts get install when they're displayed.
2) maybe spell checking shouldn't have local dictionaries but use the internet like phones do.
--Ray
On Thu, Aug 2, 2012 at 7:53 PM, Ray Strode rstrode@redhat.com wrote:
Hi,
So we will have hunspell-en in the livecd, but what if someone changes the UI or input language (this is a good reason for dictionaries to be a special case, you need them when you add input language, not UI language) they won't get the related dictionary. Could we get the control panel install the relevant dictionary using PackageKit when you add a keyboard layout? eg. if I add Arabic it should install hunspell-ar so I would have spellcheck when typing in Arabic. This will make using Fedora (and GNOME in general) easier for multilingual beginner users.
Totally agree that's a good idea. I filed this:
Two other loftier thoughts:
- maybe spell checking dictionaries should get install "just in time"
when the library is used, just like fonts get install when they're displayed.
How would you detect which language of spellcheck dict you need to install for European languages, which basically share the same alphabet?
- maybe spell checking shouldn't have local dictionaries but use the
internet like phones do.
Some phones have builtin dictionaries. Using the internet means: 1) won't work for offline/LAN only machines 2) privacy concerns 3) spellcheck might be really slow for users with very slow internet connection, for example Africa or India 4) we'll have to host it
--Ray
desktop mailing list desktop@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop
Hi,
So we will have hunspell-en in the livecd, but what if someone changes the UI or input language (this is a good reason for dictionaries to be a special case, you need them when you add input language, not UI language) they won't get the related dictionary. Could we get the control panel install the relevant dictionary using PackageKit when you add a keyboard layout? eg. if I add Arabic it should install hunspell-ar so I would have spellcheck when typing in Arabic. This will make using Fedora (and GNOME in general) easier for multilingual beginner users.
Totally agree that's a good idea. I filed this:
Two other loftier thoughts:
- maybe spell checking dictionaries should get install "just in
time" when the library is used, just like fonts get install when they're displayed.
How would you detect which language of spellcheck dict you need to install for European languages, which basically share the same alphabet?
Well I guess there's a few ways you could approach it:
- let the user pick the language (i think a lot of our apps have menu items or a language selection in the spell check dialog already) - guess from current locale / current input method - do some bad heuristic like translate.google.com does
Would take work I'm probably not going to do to get this feature, so I'm mainly just brainstorming, fwiw.
Some phones have builtin dictionaries. Using the internet means:
- won't work for offline/LAN only machines
Could mitigate (but not elliminate) this problem with caching
- privacy concerns
yea definitely an issue
- spellcheck might be really slow for users with very slow internet
connection, for example Africa or India 4) we'll have to host it
I don't think these two are a given, but certainly potentially true.
Anyway, just throwing ideas out there as food for thought.
--Ray
On Thu, 2012-08-02 at 12:53 -0400, Ray Strode wrote:
Two other loftier thoughts:
- maybe spell checking dictionaries should get install "just in time" when the library is used,
just like fonts get install when they're displayed.
Yeah, that'd be my preferred solution, i.e. https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=750986
- maybe spell checking shouldn't have local dictionaries but use the internet like phones do.
It doesn't massively appeal to me, given an example of LibreOffice auto-spellchecking a 1000 page document because you'd end up basically sending the entire document over the wire word by word.
And the spellchecking happens paragraph by paragraph in the idle-time callback, checking after each paragraph if there's been any user events in order to postpone the rest of spellchecking until later, so that section of code has to be fast.
C.
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