hunspell dictionaries, what's "missing"

[Caolán McNamara]

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/FeatureDictionary now lists the
languages for which we ship aspell dictionaries but not hunspell ones. 
i.e. Breton, Faeroese, Icelandic, Indonesian, Malayalam, Scots Gaelic
and Serbian.

Packaging those dictionaries will enable OOo to spell-check your
language and have the same level of support in
OOo/evo/gedit/xchat/tomboy/pidgen/KDE (and hopefully firefox
eventually).

Also a Swedish speaker should consider packaging the Swedish hyphenation
dictionary available from
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Dictionaries#Swedish_.28Sweden.29
which would enable better line breaking for over-long words in OOo, a
complaint I've heard occasionally.

C.

[Parag Nemade]

Hi caolan,
On Jan 9, 2008 3:52 PM, Caolan McNamara  wrote:
> http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/FeatureDictionary now lists the
> languages for which we ship aspell dictionaries but not hunspell ones.
> i.e. Breton, Faeroese, Icelandic, Indonesian, Malayalam, Scots Gaelic
> and Serbian.

Thanks for this FeatureDictionary work. I have already in
communication with Malayalam hunspell dictionary author and he need
some more time to fix some remaining issues. Also, asked him to
include license when he will release new upstream tarball. Aspell-ml
is going through review.
> Packaging those dictionaries will enable OOo to spell-check your
> language and have the same level of support in
> OOo/evo/gedit/xchat/tomboy/pidgen/KDE (and hopefully firefox
> eventually).
>
> Also a Swedish speaker should consider packaging the Swedish hyphenation
> dictionary available from
> http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Dictionaries#Swedish_.28Sweden.29
> which would enable better line breaking for over-long words in OOo, a
> complaint I've heard occasionally.

Regards,
Parag.

[Ville-Pekka Vainio]

Caolan McNamara kirjoitti:
> http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/FeatureDictionary now lists the
> languages for which we ship aspell dictionaries but not hunspell ones.
> i.e. Breton, Faeroese, Icelandic, Indonesian, Malayalam, Scots Gaelic
> and Serbian.
>
> Packaging those dictionaries will enable OOo to spell-check your
> language and have the same level of support in
> OOo/evo/gedit/xchat/tomboy/pidgen/KDE (and hopefully firefox
> eventually).

This is not strictly hunspell related, but I've been working on getting the 
free Finnish spellchecker and hyphenator Voikko into Fedora, see the thread 
at 
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2007-December/msg01721.html 
and 
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2008-January/msg00667.html 
(for some reason the web interface can't handle threads correctly when the 
month/year changes...)

Looking at the FeatureDictionary page, with Voikko we can get direct support 
for KDE and Gnome, either through the ispell compatibility binary tmispell or 
Enchant. There is also an OpenOffice extension/plugin(/whatever those are 
called?) for Voikko at 
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=156731&package_id=216218, 
I'm planning on packaging that as well, though it does look a bit 
complicated...

Firefox and Thunderbird are a bit more difficult. There is a Finnish 
spellchecking extension for those at 
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/browse/type:3. This extension is 
able to use Voikko (it works well with the libvoikko I maintain in Fedora), 
but it is distributed with a proprietary spellchecker called Soikko, so it 
can't go into Fedora. There may be a free software only Voikko extension 
coming for Firefox 3, the Voikko developers are working on it, but I'm not 
aware of the exact status of that extension currently.

[Caolán McNamara]

On Wed, 2008-01-09 at 15:00 +0200, Ville-Pekka Vainio wrote:
> Caolan McNamara kirjoitti:
> > http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/FeatureDictionary now lists the
> > languages for which we ship aspell dictionaries but not hunspell ones.
> > i.e. Breton, Faeroese, Icelandic, Indonesian, Malayalam, Scots Gaelic
> > and Serbian.
> >
> > Packaging those dictionaries will enable OOo to spell-check your
> > language and have the same level of support in
> > OOo/evo/gedit/xchat/tomboy/pidgen/KDE (and hopefully firefox
> > eventually).
>
> This is not strictly hunspell related, but I've been working on getting the 
> free Finnish spellchecker and hyphenator Voikko into Fedora, see the thread 
> at

Yeah, I saw that. Unfortunately I'm just not qualified to know what
blocks hunspell from supporting Finnish, but I'm surprised that it is
the case given that hunspell was written to handle Hungarian which I
thought was similarly agglunatively complicated as Finnish. :-(


> There is also an OpenOffice extension/plugin(/whatever those are 
> called?) for Voikko at 
> http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=156731&package_id=216218, 
> I'm planning on packaging that as well, though it does look a bit 
> complicated...

"extension" is the word of the moment FWIW. wrt. the extensions, follow
the scheme at http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/OpenOffice.org for
installing it. And I added the required -sdk packages some time ago to
enable building the voikko extension, so it should be fairly
straightforward to follow the opensuse example for the same package I
think.

I guess if there's a route to getting Finnish supported in everything
then that's fine and doesn't break the spell-checking unification if
everything ends up using the same backend for finnish eventually, just
seems a pity to have to do it separately for OOo/firefox/enchant.

C.

[Ville-Pekka Vainio]

Caolan McNamara kirjoitti:
> Yeah, I saw that. Unfortunately I'm just not qualified to know what
> blocks hunspell from supporting Finnish, but I'm surprised that it is
> the case given that hunspell was written to handle Hungarian which I
> thought was similarly agglunatively complicated as Finnish. :-(

I don't have that much knowledge on the theory of Finnish language or spell 
checking either, I just pretty much have an itch to scratch here since I'd 
like to use Voikko with Fedora.

I believe the main reason for not using hunspell is suomi-malaga, which I've 
packaged in Fedora as malaga-suomi-voikko. It is less work for the relatively 
small number of developers and in some cases it works better than hunspell 
would. More information is at 
http://voikko.sourceforge.net/architecture.html.
> "extension" is the word of the moment FWIW. wrt. the extensions, follow
> the scheme at http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/OpenOffice.org for
> installing it. And I added the required -sdk packages some time ago to
> enable building the voikko extension, so it should be fairly
> straightforward to follow the opensuse example for the same package I
> think.

Thanks for adding the SDK and also for the documentation on the wiki. I'll 
probably ask for help on this list if I encounter some issues I can't solve 
myself.

[Rik van Riel]

On Wed, 09 Jan 2008 13:24:42 +0000
Caolan McNamara  wrote:
> On Wed, 2008-01-09 at 15:00 +0200, Ville-Pekka Vainio wrote:
> > Caolan McNamara kirjoitti:
> > This is not strictly hunspell related, but I've been working on getting the 
> > free Finnish spellchecker and hyphenator Voikko into Fedora, see the thread 
> > at
>
> Yeah, I saw that. Unfortunately I'm just not qualified to know what
> blocks hunspell from supporting Finnish, but I'm surprised that it is
> the case given that hunspell was written to handle Hungarian which I
> thought was similarly agglunatively complicated as Finnish. :-(

Most of Finnish grammar may be simpler than Hungarian, but IIRC
Finnish does have some limited vowel shifting going on with certain
cases on certain words.

That might confuse a spell checker.

Hungarian mostly seems complex in ways that spell checkers aren't
bothered by :)