Ubuntu – Choose Languages for Spellcheck

languagespell-checking

I speak a number of languages and switch between them all the time. The user interface usually stays set to English and I switch the spell-check to the appropriate language. To this end, I went to "Language Support" in Ubuntu's system settings and installed all the required languages.

This works great, except for one annoyance. Every single variant of the languages I chose appear in the list when I want to switch languages! For instance, there are like half a dozen English variants: Australia, Canada, South Africa, United Kingdom, United States. The same is true for Dutch, French or German, and Spanish is even worse. This seems to happen everywhere I can choose a language for spell-check: Firefox, gedit, Libre Office, etc. Kind of cumbersome when I have to scroll through that LONG list several times a day!

How could I possibly limit the number of language variants in those lists? I usually only need one variant for each language: United States for English, Flemish for Dutch, Belgian for French, Spain for Spanish, etc.

Thanks for your input.

Best Answer

This is not a solution, but an attempt to bring some light on the topic.

There does not exist as many dictionaries for spellchecking as the number of options showed. If you for example run the command

ls /usr/share/hunspell

you see that the folder includes quite a few symlinks. Those symlinks have been installed by the various packages which install the dictionaries, and I suppose the reason is that the applications should be able to find a suitable dictionary based on the current locale (the value of the LANG variable).

It would be possible to limit the number of variants by deleting symlinks in the just mentioned folder and some other related folders. But it's indeed not a good idea, since they will be reinstalled next time respective package is updated.

I don't think there is an easy solution to this issue.

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – Spell check and locale

A corresponding question was asked about Thunderbird. The solution provided there worked for me:

go to go to /usr/share/hunspell/
delete the languages you do not want (e.g. rm de_BE.* to delete Belgian German)

I am not sure why you got the message about incomplete language support - I didn't have that problem.

But in addition, you may still have manually installed dictionaries in Firefox. Interestingly, just disabling/uninstalling wasn't enough (e.g. via Tools | Add-Ons). To get rid of the languages I didn't like, I went to ~/.mozilla/firefox/*.default/extensions and deleted the dictionalry-folders e.g. rm -r de_BE* that did the trick.

Ubuntu – Remove language dialects from Thunderbird

I was able to resolve this by uninstalling the respective hunspell packages:

First I searched for all installed hunspell packages:

aptitude search hunspell|grep ^i

Which returned this list:

i   hunspell-de-at   
i   hunspell-de-ch   
iB  hunspell-de-de   
i A hunspell-en-ca   
i A hunspell-en-gb   
i   hunspell-en-us   
i A hunspell-en-za   
i A libhunspell-1.3-0

Then I removed the unnecessary ones with:

sudo apt purge hunspell-de-at hunspell-de-ch hunspell-en-ca \
hunspell-en-gb hunspell-en-za

Note: A few redundancies still remain, which are caused by the fact that some packages install symlinks to other languages which then show up as duplicates in thunderbird. For example hunspell-de-de installs a symlink name de_BE.aff in /usr/share/hunspell which points to de_DE.aff. See https://launchpad.net/bugs/651586 (Thanks to Gunnar Hjalmarsson for pointing this out in the comments).

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – Spell check and locale

Ubuntu – Remove language dialects from Thunderbird

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