310285 - Share spelling dictionaries with OpenOffice and other apps

Status: NEW

(Core :: Spelling checker, enhancement)

Description

[Toralf Lund]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-GB; rv:1.7.6) Gecko/20050226 Firefox/1.0.1
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-GB; rv:1.7.6) Gecko/20050226 Firefox/1.0.1

I've been meaning to add this for a long time:

The fact that thunderbird shares dictionary format with OOo, and some other
apps, too, is obviously quite nice. However, the applications of course ought to
share the actual dictionary files, too; installing duplicates of the dictionary
files is of course not very nice.

Possible courses of action
1. Search some common OOo (dictionary) install locations for dictionary files -
in addition to the <install dir>/components/myspell
2. Agree with the people over at openoffice.org (and maintainers of other
applications using MySpell) about a common install location used for all
dictionaries (and search for them only there.)
3. Similar to above, but search common dir(s) *in addition to* current
dictionary location.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:

Comment 1

[Toralf Lund]

See also http://qa.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=51451

Comment 2

[Toralf Lund]

Attachment: Shell script used as workaround

The shellscript attached here shows what I do today to get around this issue. I
install this on /usr/lib/thunderbird/components/myspell and run it at install
time, and also when open office is upgraded, in order to give thunderbird
access to all OOo dictionaries via symbolic links.

Comment 3

[Jo Hermans]

is this a dupe of bug 216382 or did you split it off ?

Comment 4

[Toralf Lund]

Right. I thought I remembered that there was another report related to this, but
I was unable to find anything when searching the bug database just now - or I
may not have filed another report.

But this report may still be seen as a "split-off". Bug 216382 is (originally)
about the need to move the dictionaries *from* where they are today, based on
considerations about internal organisation. This is more of a specific request
about moving them *to* somewhere, based on rather different considerations (i.e.
sharing data with other apps.)

I think I'll let you decide whether you want to have two separate reports open
based on that.

Comment 5

[Benjamin Smedberg]

This is not only linux, though it is perhaps most useful on linux. Let's make
this one depend on that one for the moment. Solution #3 is the course we are
going to take (with appropriate safeguards to prevent duplicates, presumably,
though I don't know exactly how to accomplish that).

Comment 6

[Emil Stenström]

This is a great enhancement! What I need most is sharing of dictionaries between Thunderbird and Firefox, but I wouldn't protest having more programs supported of course. I use webmail in Firefox in exactly the same way as I use Thunderbird, and right now I need to install my native language (Swedish) once in Firefox and once in Thunderbird. "Add to dictionary" only adds words to one of them, making adding words annoying too. I'd love for this to be a priority.

Comment 7

[Matt Caywood]

Comment 6 is Bug 355066 and Bug 226699. 

Let's keep this one about sharing the dictionaries with non-Mozilla applications.