518559 - German spell checker: Abbreviations with "." (period) are not handled correctly

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 318040

(Mozilla Localizations :: de / German, defect)

Description

[Patrik Spieß]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.9.1.3) Gecko/20090824 Firefox/3.5.3 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.9.1.3) Gecko/20090824 Firefox/3.5.3 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)

When a text in a text field contains abbreviations that end with a period (examples: "Dr." "ggf." "etc.") the spell checker complains that they are not in the dictionary (the word without the succeeding "." is underlined in red). The correction choices include the word itself with the "." (i.e. "Dr." "ggf." "etc."). When you choose one of them, the word without the dot is replaced with the word with the dot (results: "Dr.." "ggf.." "etc.."). After that, the word without the dot is again marked as wrongly spelled.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
Enter "Dr." in a text box with German spell check activated

Actual Results:  
The "Dr" part of "Dr." is underlined. "Dr." is suggested as replacement by the spell checker. Choosing replacement with "Dr." results string "Dr..". Again "Dr" is marked as wrongly spelled.

Expected Results:  
"Dr." should not be marked as wrongly spelled.

Comment 1

[Tobias (:Tobbi) Markus]

KaiRo: You're the maintainer of the German dictionary. Can you confirm?

Comment 2

[Robert Kaiser]

I'm only the packager, the dictionary is from OpenOffice.org, you need to take it up with them and I'll package and put up an updated dictionary once one is available there.

Comment 3

[Axel Hecht [:Pike]]

Is there an upstream ticket for this? If so, we have "See also" bug urls now, could you add a reference here?

Comment 4

[David von Oheimb]

This bug is still present in lightning 1.0b2pre
I guess it also affects other languages.

Comment 5

[Kuno Meyer]

I can confirm this on TB 3.1.1: The spell checking engine seems to be feeded only with "Dr" instead of "Dr.", thus leading to the described behavior.

Without having investigated the code: I don't think this is an issue of the dictionary, since the dictionary knows the correct abbreviated title "Dr." and makes the right proposal for correction. It is more an issue of the tokenizer that does not recognize/take into account "Dr." as an single token.

Comment 6

[Kuno Meyer]

By the way: OpenOffice 3.2.0 does not show this behavior of marking the "Dr" part of "Dr." as being wrongly spelled. A clear indication to me that the bug is in the Mozilla codebase.

Comment 7

[Christian Harraeus]

The bug is still present in Thunderbird 3.1.6.

Comment 8

[Kadir Topal [:atopal]]

KaiRo, is there anything we can do on our end?

Comment 10

[Robert Kaiser]

(In reply to comment #8)
> KaiRo, is there anything we can do on our end?

Not that I know of, I'm just packaging igerman98 .dic and .aff files, so if anything, only Björn can do something, and he doesn't read Bugzilla and seems to not react to any communication from me.

Comment 11

[Christian Harraeus]

Received the Version 2.0.2 of "Deutsches Wörterbuch" this evening. The bug with "Dr." and "evtl." is gone but is still there for "ggf.", "med.", "Prof." and sure for some other abbreviations which I did not test.

Comment 12

[Kadir Topal [:atopal]]

Well, if we can't do anything here, I'll 'wontfix' this.

Comment 13

[David von Oheimb]

I find 'wontfix' a pretty frustrating "solution" to this annoying little bug.
Actually this one on the German dictionary is pretty sure just a special case of https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=318040 - so better mark this one as a duplicate of bug 318040.

Comment 14

[Kadir Topal [:atopal]]

Right, thanks for checking, David.