Thunderbird gets a new spell checker, Firefox may follow
Hunspell, an open source spell checker engine has been added to Thunderbird 3 development code replacing previous MySpell engine that currently ships with Thunderbird 2.x and Firefox 2.x.
Hunspell also replaced MySpell as OpenOffice.org’s spell checker last year as it provides some unique and welcomed advantages including support for Asian languages, Unicode support, morphological analysis and support for complex compounds and agglutinative languages like Azeri, Basque, Estonian and Hungarian.
MySpell dictionaries are fully compatible with Hunspell which definitely helps for a very easy transition.
Interestingly, while looking around about Hunspell I found that project Runasimipi is creating a Hunspell Runasimi dictionary to be used with localized versions of Abiword, OpenOffice.org and Firefox at least. This looks as an amazing coincidence for me, as some days ago I was thinking about starting a Runasimi localized Firefox.
Runasimi, better known as Quechua (ketch-wa), is and official language in Peru and the second most spoken after Spanish with about 3 million speakers. An estimated total of 7 million speakers are counted in several other South American countries including Ecuador, Argentina, Bolivia, Colombia, Chile and Brazil.
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July 4th, 2007 at 1:33 am
Morphological analysis… does that mean that it will be … umm … smarter?
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July 11th, 2007 at 1:36 am
Good… I always thought Firefox’s Spell Check was horrible. (For instance: I just misspelled SPELL as speel and spell was not a suggestion.
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July 17th, 2007 at 6:32 am
Can they please add a transparent(variable opacity?) spell check window. It would help a lot, eg when seeing sentences in context etc.
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November 12th, 2007 at 9:27 am
Thunderbird spell check seems to run but never finds any errors. Have I installed it incorrectly? How can I tun spell checking on?
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November 14th, 2007 at 6:29 pm
My spell checker finds nothing. I have the spell checker turned on (Tools/options/composition) but it fails to find even the simplest misspelled word.
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December 11th, 2007 at 4:05 pm
Any way to get the spell checker to weight the first character higher when giving suggestions?
example:
“asitance” comes back with “hesitance” and other derivatives when I missspell “assistance”
“dirivitives” offers up “primitiveness” when MS Outlook finds “derivatives” as the first hit.
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February 11th, 2008 at 8:22 pm
The spelling check in Firefox is far from perfect.
Firstly they offer no help to the bad typist. Since we are all typists now - and untrained in the main - we have more typing errors than spelling errors - and so-called spell checkers should take account of this.
I often mistype “Politics” as “POlitics” but the spell-checker is no help here. Firefox would be better with a better spelling and typing checker - and a way for people to add their own suggestions as to the word they meant to type
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March 24th, 2008 at 9:43 am
I have just downloaded thunderbird and it works perfectly with one exception. The spellchecker simply is inactive. I tryed to download load it from monzilla without sucess. What can I do/ You can probbably tell from ths that my speling is atrocious. All advice welcome Chris.
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