522047 - Finnish dictionary does not show up on TB 3.0pre settings panel, message compose window drop-down, but does function in separate spell check window

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 500606

(Mozilla Localizations :: fi / Finnish, defect)

Description

[Ville Pohjanheimo (inactive)]

Finnish dictionary does not show up on TB's settings panel for dictionaries (no entries in dictionary drop-down), message compose window drop-down, but it is selectable in the actual spell check window In Firefox pre3.6b1, spell checker is not visible anywhere so it is essentially broken.

This breaks, among other things, online spell checking as there is no way to select Finnish as a language for that in TB/FX.

Tested on nightly version of TB pre3 and FX pre3.6b1, clean profile on TB. Linux/Debian/amd64 native FX, 32bit TB. I will test on other platforms and get back with that.

Comment 1

[Andris Pavenis]

Tested with Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.1.4pre) Gecko/20090922 Fedora/3.0-2.7.b4.fc11 Thunderbird/3.0b4.

Spell check shows up in dialog opened by pressing spellcheck button on toolbar of message editor window. Spellcheck menu entries are not however seen in context popup menu in of the same window.

So I guess that could be problem not specifically with Finnish spell-checker, but with spell-checker in Thunderbird generally.

Comment 2

[Ville Pohjanheimo (inactive)]

Andris: We see the same behaviour confirmed. However, two other spellcheckers I've tried (English-US, Swedish) don't have this problem, so the problem seems to have some special connection with the Finnish spell checker.

I opened another bug (bug 524305) on the apparently unrelated Firefox 3.6 issues and changed title correspondingly.

Comment 3

[Andris Pavenis]

Other mentioned spell-checkers use built-in hun-spell support. The finnish spell-checker uses external spell-checker. In old versions nsiXULRuntime interface was used. The UUID of this interface has been changed in FF-3.6pre and as result instance of corresponding object cannot be found.

Current SVN version (and also tagged version 1.0) no more uses this interface, so it is expected to be compatible also with FF 3.6pre (and corresponding nightly builds of Thunderbird). I have not however checked it for some time.

So I guess it is time to update a version of Finnish language spell-checker on
addons.mozilla.org

Comment 4

[Andris Pavenis]

Settings panel (Edit|Tools -> Preferences -> Composition -> Spellcheck) accesses directly the default spellchecker @mozilla.org/spellchecker/engine;1 (interface mozISpellCheckingEngine). As result installed external spellcheckers are not looked up and the corresponding dictionaries do not appear in the list.

Unfortunatelly nsISpellChecker is not exported to JavaScript as far as I understand.

One more possibility could be to use nsIEditorSpellCheck which is exported to JavaScript. Unfortunatelly also that cannot be used in a easy way as it need nsIEditor for initialization.

So I see some ways out of the problem:
1) use the same way as used in nsSpellChecker to find external spellcheckers and build a list. Main problem is code duplication. One can easily experiment by editting file content/messenger/preferences/compose.js inside chrome/messenger.jar.
2) export nsISpellChecker interface to Javascript.
3) make some other directory list providing class and make it available from JavaScript.

I guess neither of them is realistic for 3.0.X. 2) would be nicest in long run.

For time being we'll probably have to live with this problem. A possible workaround is install at least one other dictionary additionally to Finnish one. In that case one cannot access Finnish dictionary through settings dialog, but inline spell-check can be enabled and switched to Finnish dictionary in compose window.

Comment 5

[daesloug]

Hello, when is this going to be fixed?!

I still can't upgrade from TB2, because e.g. "Dictionary Switcher" (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/dictionary-switcher-for-thunde/) or "Quick Locale Switcher" (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/quick-locale-switcher/) can't "access" (or whatever the technical term is in this issue) the Finnish dictionary (tried the latest 1.9.0 version.. though I believe that it doesn't matter because the problem is elsewhere.. in TB).

1½ since this was opened and still NEW and not fixed? Is it impossible?

Comment 6

[Ludovic Hirlimann [:Usul]]

(In reply to daesloug from comment #5)
> Hello, when is this going to be fixed?!
> 1½ since this was opened and still NEW and not fixed? Is it impossible?

When we'll get a patch, and they are very welcome.