Closed Bug 469778 Opened 16 years ago Closed 16 years ago

the language menu in the 'spell' tool is unusably long

Categories

(Thunderbird :: Mail Window Front End, enhancement)

x86
Linux
enhancement
Not set
normal

Tracking

(Not tracked)

RESOLVED INVALID

People

(Reporter: seefeld, Unassigned)

Details

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.0.4) Gecko/2008111217 Fedora/3.0.4-1.fc9 Firefox/3.0.4
Build Identifier: version 2.0.0.18 (20081119)

As I'm daily writing mail in English, French, and German, I have enabled language add-ons for these three. This results in the 'Spell' menu to be rather long, with 21 entries for en_* alone !

It should be possible to configure in a fine-grained way which of those languages (or language-variants) are enabled / available, such that the actual switch I have to do per-mail is easy (ideally a single key stroke or button press away).

Thanks,
           Stefan


Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Install multiple language add-ons
2. Open 'Compose' window
3. Visit the 'Spell' menu in the toolbar
Actual Results:  
A long list of menu items is pulled down

Expected Results:  
Only as few items as I have configured are shown
Are you using Fedora's Thunderbird, or one downloaded from mozilla.org? Fedora's intentionally installs all the MySpell dictionaries you have installed on the system when it installs Thunderbird.
I'm using Fedora's Thunderbird. I have explicitly disabled most language add-ons, only leaving the English, French, and German language packs.

What I'm asking for is an option for finer-grained control. As each of those language packs seems to install a set of dictionaries, I'd like some way to switch off those dictionaries one-by-one, until I have in my 'spell' menu exactly three items left: one for English, one for French, and one for German.

Thanks,
        Stefan
I strongly doubt you're seeing dictionaries from langpacks, but instead are seeing dictionaries from the way Fedora's installer (e.g. http://cvs.fedoraproject.org/viewvc/rpms/thunderbird/F-10/thunderbird.spec?revision=1.120&view=markup) does |ln -s %{_datadir}/myspell $RPM_BUILD_ROOT%{mozappdir}/dictionaries|. They install langpacks as extensions, which makes them show up as extensions you can disable. If you were installing your own choice of dictionaries through Tools - Addons, that would also make them show up as extensions you can disable. However, the way they chose to symlink every dictionary that they or OpenOffice or whoever had already installed makes Thunderbird think that unlike the usual case of having a single app-shipped dictionary, which isn't an addon and shouldn't be shown as an addon, you have a whole bunch (however many you already had installed) of app-shipped dictionaries that aren't addons and shouldn't be shown there where you can disable them.

We already have a system for finer-grained control: install dictionaries as addons, just the ones you want, and if you decide you don't want one, uninstall or disable the addon. If knowing what they've done, symlinking into appdir/dictionaries, isn't enough to help you fix your problem, or if you think they shouldn't be doing that, or should be doing it differently, please file a bug in Fedora's tracker: sorry, but we don't have any code which does that, so we can't change our code to stop doing it.
Status: UNCONFIRMED → RESOLVED
Closed: 16 years ago
Resolution: --- → INVALID
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