269051 - Spell-checker should be replaced with aspell engine

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Thunderbird :: General, enhancement)

Description

[Alan Robinson]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0

The quality of replacement word suggestions is very low in the built-in spell
checker. As a poor speller, I find that I frequently have to manually invoke
aspell to find out what the correct spelling is, since thunderbird cannot guess it.

Aspell is free and open source (LGPL). Aspell works better than any commercially
available spell check engine. Aspell is available as a library.

Why waste effort developing a new spell check engine? Swap in aspell instead.  

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:

Comment 1

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

LGPL only can't be checked in to the mozilla tree. It must be tri-licensed.

Comment 2

[Alan Robinson]

That is unfortunate. What is tri-licensed? Googling that term returns nothing
relevant.

Comment 3

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

http://www.mozilla.org/MPL/relicensing-faq.html#new-license

Also, how good is aspell in suggesting words for other languages?

Comment 4

[Alan Robinson]

I have no personal experience with other languages, but I do know that there is
an extensive list of supported languages.

It's a little hard to read, due to the inclusion of current dictionaries and
planned dictionaries, but can be found here:

http://aspell.sourceforge.net/man-html/Supported.html

Comment 5

[Comio]

(In reply to comment #1)
> LGPL only can't be checked in to the mozilla tree. It must be tri-licensed.

You should implement an interface to the aspell engime... (e.g, evolution
spellchecker system)

ciao!

Comment 6

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

you could, but then it would not work on windows, which is not acceptable

Comment 7

[Alan Robinson]

(In reply to comment #6)
> you could, but then it would not work on windows, which is not acceptable

Aspell has a windows DLL interface which could be used, just as there is a
shared library option under Linux. I don't know how similar the two interfaces
are, but they are probably identical aside from the code you use to make the
dynamic binding.  

Comment 8

[Emmanuel Fleury]

Hi all,

I agree with Alan Robinson (first reporter), the efficiency of the spellchecker
in Thunderbird is quite low and the proposals are inaccurate. Aspell might be a
good replacement in matter of efficiency (I use it for several languages like
English, French, Danish and German and I always was satisfied both with the word
lists that are coming with and the accuracy of the proposals).

The home page of aspell is: http://aspell.net/
The list of supported languages: http://aspell.net/man-html/Supported.html
There is a Windows port: http://aspell.net/win32/

The only problem is the licensing which is only LGPL (see the manual:
http://aspell.net/man-html/Copying.html#Copying). But, coding a wrapper to the
aspell library should solve the problem, no ? (I have to admit that I'm always
lost with these license problems :-/ ).

Moreover, I don't know if any of you is familiar with the Evolution Composer
spellchecker, but Evolution is using gnome-spell which is a wrapper to the
aspell library.

Evolution spellchecker has several nice features which are missing in Thunderbird:

- A spellchecking of combined languages (you might use english words in the
middle of French, Danish, German or whatever mix you make).

- An 'on-the'fly' spellchecker which underline the mispelled words with some
suggestions when the mispelled word is right-clicked

Hum, well, that's all folks. :)

Comment 9

[Doug Wright]

See bug 240600.

Comment 10

[Doug Wright]

Also see 278310 and 278312

Comment 11

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

ehm, no. The backend has nothing to do with the frontend.

Comment 12

[Brian King [:kinger]]

FYI, the Linspire Internet Suite (a customised Mozilla) uses the ASpell engine.

http://info.linspire.com/suite.html

Comment 13

[Brett Wilson]

As mentioned above, we can't include this because it's GPL. IANAL, but it seems dynamic linking doesn't solve the problem. We can't even distribute the GPLed myspell dictionaries by default.

Bug 319778 is to use hunspell instead, which is supposed to be better than myspell and has a better license for us.

You should be able to write an extension that implements the spellchecker API that calls through to aspell. Although not an extension, the mac people are working on support for the mac spellchecker in bug 151040.