218463 - Contractions are never suggested by the spellchecker

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(MailNews Core :: Composition, defect)

Description

[Jack Eidsness]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; WinNT4.0; en-US; rv:1.5b) Gecko/20030827
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; WinNT4.0; en-US; rv:1.5b) Gecko/20030827

When a word, specifically a contraction, is misspelled by the omission of an
apostrophe, the spell checker recognizes the word is a misspelling, but doesn't
suggest the correct word.  Contractions don't appear on the correctly spelled
word list.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Initiate the writing of a new mail or news message (ctrl-m etc.)
2. Write a mail but leave out an apostrophe from a common contraction, e.g.
"dont" "didnt" "wasnt"
3. Click the "spell" button

Actual Results:  
When "dont" comes up for review, it suggests donut and other words but "don't"
isn't on the list.  "don t" is in the list, however.  "wasn t" isn't, but I dont
see why it would be (but neither is "wasn't" a false positive for wrong spelling).


Expected Results:  
don't / shouldn't / wasn't should appear as suggestions, preferably at the top
of the list, but I'll take what I can get.

I've added only a few words to the custom dictionary, none with apostrophes. 
Adding "don't" to the custom dictionary and repeating the test gave me identical
results as before.

Comment 1

[(not reading, please use [e-mail] instead)]

*** Bug 242552 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 2

[Misty]

I can still reproduce this with version 0.7.3 (20040803).

Comment 3

[Anne]

(In reply to comment #0)
> User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; WinNT4.0; en-US; rv:1.5b)
Gecko/20030827
> Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; WinNT4.0; en-US; rv:1.5b)
Gecko/20030827
> 
> When a word, specifically a contraction, is misspelled by the omission of an
> apostrophe, the spell checker recognizes the word is a misspelling, but doesn't
> suggest the correct word.  Contractions don't appear on the correctly spelled
> word list.
> 
> Reproducible: Always
> 
> Steps to Reproduce:
> 1. Initiate the writing of a new mail or news message (ctrl-m etc.)
> 2. Write a mail but leave out an apostrophe from a common contraction, e.g.
> "dont" "didnt" "wasnt"
> 3. Click the "spell" button
> 
> Actual Results:  
> When "dont" comes up for review, it suggests donut and other words but "don't"
> isn't on the list.  "don t" is in the list, however.  "wasn t" isn't, but I dont
> see why it would be (but neither is "wasn't" a false positive for wrong spelling).
> 
> 
> Expected Results:  
> don't / shouldn't / wasn't should appear as suggestions, preferably at the top
> of the list, but I'll take what I can get.
> 
> I've added only a few words to the custom dictionary, none with apostrophes. 
> Adding "don't" to the custom dictionary and repeating the test gave me identical
> results as before.

I have reported this bug so many times I think no one reads these reports. I see
others are now reporting it as well.. Lets hope it gets fixed finally

Comment 4

[Michiel van Leeuwen (email: mvl+moz@)]

please, don't quote entire comments. It makes the bug hard to read, and thus
less likely to get fixed.
setting dependency on bug 240600, which i think also fixes this

Comment 5

[Michiel van Leeuwen (email: mvl+moz@)]

*** Bug 266136 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 6

[Chris Rowland]

As a workaround, there is a file you can modify to get contractions suggested.
I'm not exactly sure what the file's purpose is, but it does work.

In my installation, this file is en-US.aff, and is located in the
/components/myspell/ subdirectory of my installation.
it contains the line:
TRY esianrtolcdugmphbyfvkwzESIANRTOLCDUGMPHBYFVKWZ

adding an apostrophe to that line will tell the spell checker to try using an
apostrophe to fix a misspelling, ex:
TRY 'esianrtolcdugmphbyfvkwzESIANRTOLCDUGMPHBYFVKWZ

Comment 7

[Jack Eidsness]

(In reply to comment #6)
> As a workaround, there is a file you can modify to get contractions suggested.

Well, that was easy.  anyone know why we couldn't distribute the file that way?
I found it in the source tree, but I am not, at this time, capable of building
testing or recognizing any potential problems caused by this modification.

extensions/spellcheck/myspell/dictionaries/en-US.aff
Index: extensions/spellcheck/myspell/dictionaries/en-US.aff
===================================================================
RCS file: /cvsroot/mozilla/extensions/spellcheck/myspell/dictionaries/en-US.aff,v
retrieving revision 1.3
diff -u -r1.3 en-US.aff
--- extensions/spellcheck/myspell/dictionaries/en-US.aff        19 Feb 2004
21:37:30 -0000      1.3
+++ extensions/spellcheck/myspell/dictionaries/en-US.aff        27 Oct 2004
15:09:07 -0000
@@ -1,5 +1,5 @@
 SET ISO8859-1
-TRY esianrtolcdugmphbyfvkwzESIANRTOLCDUGMPHBYFVKWZ
+TRY 'esianrtolcdugmphbyfvkwzESIANRTOLCDUGMPHBYFVKWZ

 PFX A Y 1
 PFX A   0     re         .

Comment 8

[Michiel van Leeuwen (email: mvl+moz@)]

One reason is that the file is actually a copy of the file from openoffice.org,
and i don't think we want to branch from it. That means that if the file is ever
updated, someone needs to think of the need to add the '.
(maybe the openoffice.org file actually has the ' in it now, i didn't check)

Comment 9

[Bishop Clark (LC957)]

what?  We don't want to lose sync with buggy upstream source?

OOo/share/dict/ooo/en_US.aff:2:
TRY esianrtolcdugmphbyfvkwzESIANRTOLCDUGMPHBYFVKWZ'

Too late!  8-)

Comment 10

[Michiel van Leeuwen (email: mvl+moz@)]

Yeah, i notices my ooo installation had it right, after i made the comment.
But lets keep it the same, and add the ' at the end, instead of the front. (it
actually makes a difference in the order the suggestions are shown)

Comment 11

[Jack Eidsness]

I can see that this is now fixed in version 1.0+ (20050705) or earlier;
Contractions are suggested in my tests.

Comment 12

[Jaime Mitchell (use [e-mail] for email)]

Reopen to mark WFM as the code change which caused the fix is unknown.