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system hunspell dictionaries

  • 5 replies
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  • Last reply by erpmozilla

erpmozilla
erpmozilla
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For long I've been using Firefox and to get the same dictionaries in most applications I used to add the system hunspell dictionaries to firefox by creating symbolic links in <firefox-base-dir>/dictionaries/.

I tried to do the same in firefox-67.0.1 and in firefox-68.0b8 (dev). It did not work!

I tried to rename the links from, for example, en_US.{dic,aff} to en-US.{dic,aff}, respectively. It did not work!

According to http://kb.mozillazine.org/Dictionaries the dictionaries directory should be added at the same level as the "components" directory. However there are no such directory. I then tried to move the "dictionaries" directory to the "browser" directory, to the "defaults" directory and to the "pref" directory. Nothing worked!

It however still works in older versions of firefox.

Is it no longer possible to use system hunspell dictionaries in firefox? If so why is this very handy feature removed?

/Erik

For long I've been using Firefox and to get the same dictionaries in most applications I used to add the system hunspell dictionaries to firefox by creating symbolic links in <firefox-base-dir>/dictionaries/. I tried to do the same in firefox-67.0.1 and in firefox-68.0b8 (dev). It did not work! I tried to rename the links from, for example, en_US.{dic,aff} to en-US.{dic,aff}, respectively. It did not work! According to http://kb.mozillazine.org/Dictionaries the dictionaries directory should be added at the same level as the "components" directory. However there are no such directory. I then tried to move the "dictionaries" directory to the "browser" directory, to the "defaults" directory and to the "pref" directory. Nothing worked! It however still works in older versions of firefox. Is it no longer possible to use system hunspell dictionaries in firefox? If so why is this very handy feature removed? /Erik

Chosen solution

Firefox looks for this pref: spellchecker.dictionary_path (hidden and would have to be created) and check this environment variable: DICPATH --- See:

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cor-el
cor-el
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Chosen Solution

Firefox looks for this pref: spellchecker.dictionary_path (hidden and would have to be created) and check this environment variable: DICPATH --- See:

Modified by cor-el

erpmozilla
erpmozilla Question owner
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Thank you very much! This solved my problem!

/Erik

erpmozilla
erpmozilla Question owner
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From the source code it seems like the default behavior of accepting dictionaries in <install_path>/dictionaries/ was removed in release 62 of Firefox. Using the DICPATH environment variable was added around version 55.

Out of curiosity what was the reason behind removing <install_path>/dictionaries as a default path for adding dictionaries? (As a side note, it should not be too hard to add back the former default behavior as an else clause in the DICPATH code in mozHunspell.cpp.)

/Erik

cor-el
cor-el
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See also:

  • Bug 1310835 - Search DICPATH for Hunspell dictionaries

(please do not comment in bug reports
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/page.cgi?id=etiquette.html)

(I fixed the link to the file in glue instead of src; sorry about that)

erpmozilla
erpmozilla Question owner
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Yes, having DICPATH is a very nice feature. However, I can't see why <install_path>/dictionaries and DICPATH are mutually exclusive, and it seems like both methods existed simultaneously up until version 61.