language-support-en pollutes Firefox's spell-check languages list

[Bogdan Butnaru]

Hello! This is about the package language-support-en on Ubuntu Gutsy, but it applies generally to all language-support-* packages in all or most other Ubuntu versions.

When I install the package, English dictionaries for the spell-checking feature of Firefox are installed. The problem is that it doesn't install a single dictionary; I get six different entries in the languages list (right-click on a spell-checkable field, go to the "Languages..." menu): "English / United Kingdom", "en_US", "English / United States", "en_ZA", "English / South Africa" and "en_GB". I also need the Romanian dictionary (which added "Romanian" and "ro_RO") and French (which interestingly only adds _one_ entry). By the way, in Firefox's languages list in the Add-ons window there are only three entries, one for each language.

In conclusion, instead of choosing between three options I am now forced to choose between nine!

What's worse, it seems these dictionaries cannot be disabled. I tried disabling English in Firefox's Add-ons window, it's grayed-out but the six options still appear in the right-click menu. This means that I can't simply get rid of them and install a separate dictionary. (I could uninstall the language-support-* packages, but then I'd loose the other features of the packages, like OOo spell-check.)

[Hew (hew)]

I can confirm this issue. Uninstalling the relevant myspell-en-* packages (and restarting firefox) will remove the respective entries, but ideally bug #28226 should be fixed so just one dictionary is installed in the first place.

This bug is really about the two entries per dictionary, eg "en_ZA" as well as "English / South Africa". I'm not sure why this occurs, but I can confirm it.

[Artiom (ar-molchanov)]

I confirm the bug and I have made some investigations.
When I install myspell dictionaries for GB Engish in the dictionary folder I have 2 files en_GB.aff and en_GB.dic. And 2 links en-GB.aff, en-GB.dic.
Then in firefox context menu I have English/ United Kingdom and en_GB. If I replace the links with "-" by the files they points and delete the files with "_" (so I have only one pair of files with "-") I have one language, the good one English/ United Kingdom.

Why Firefox doesn't use dictionary.lst ?

[Alexander Sack (asac)]

On Wed, Jun 18, 2008 at 12:54:01PM -0000, Artiom wrote:
> I confirm the bug and I have made some investigations.
> When I install myspell dictionaries for GB Engish in the dictionary folder I have 2 files en_GB.aff and en_GB.dic. And 2 links en-GB.aff, en-GB.dic.
> Then in firefox context menu I have English/ United Kingdom and en_GB. If I replace the links with "-" by the files they points and delete the files with "_" (so I have only one pair of files with "-") I have one language, the good one English/ United Kingdom.

Are all those dict files above shipped by the same package? can you
please figure which packages brings them to your system?

 affects ubuntu/firefox-3.0
 status invalid

 affects ubuntu
 status incomplete
 tag needs-reassignment

 - Alexander

[Hew (hew)]

The issue is caused by myspell-en-au, myspell-en-gb and myspell-en-us, which create both the en_*.dic/aff files, and the en-* links (Note the difference between _ and -). I'm not a programmer and don't know how firefox works, but I suspect it's just scanning all files in the /usr/share/myspell/dicts directory which is why it ends up with two copies. The '-' version is the one firefox likes as it gives the proper name to it. Can the '_' version simply be renamed, or do applications use this version?

dictionary.lst appears to be an OpenOffice.org thing (installed by openoffice.org-common). I'm by no definition an expert in this area, but it seems like there needs to be an improvement of standards in the dictionary/languages area.

[Hew (hew)]

I guess I should add that since it's a myspell-en-* issue, the appropriate package (imo) is language-support-writing-en as the myspell-en-* packages are a direct dependency of this.

[Artiom (ar-molchanov)]

Exactly. All these files are included in myspell-en-gb package.

[OrelEagle (oreleagle)]

I think this also affects German dictionaries: my Ubuntu (Intrepid, but the problem was there in Hardy too) has support for English, French and German. I have only 1 entry in Firefox languages for French, but 7 for English (en_ZA, en_AU, en_US, en_GB, English / United Kingdom, English / United States, English / Australia. Note that I don't have English / South Africa) and 9 for German (de_AT, de_DE, de_CH, German / Germany, German / Liechtenstein, German / Belgium, German / Austria, German / Luxembourg, German / Switzerland).

Here is the result of local -a:

C
de_AT.utf8
de_BE.utf8
de_CH.utf8
de_DE.utf8
de_LU.utf8
en_AU.utf8
en_BW.utf8
en_CA.utf8
en_DK.utf8
en_GB.utf8
en_HK.utf8
en_IE.utf8
en_IN
en_NZ.utf8
en_PH.utf8
en_SG.utf8
en_US.utf8
en_ZA.utf8
en_ZW.utf8
fr_BE.utf8
fr_CA.utf8
fr_CH.utf8
fr_FR.utf8
fr_LU.utf8
POSIX

Btw, is there a way to choose which locales I want (for example, I'm interested only in de_DE, so I don't need the others)? In the language support program I can only choose the "top-level languages" (English, French, German)...

[Benjamin Drung (bdrung)]

igerman98 is the source package of hunspell-de-de, which provides de_DE.dic and de-DE.dic in /usr/share/myspell/dicts/.

[farchumbre (farchumbre)]

Did anyone find a way to remove all undesired dictionaries yet?
I use 4 different languages, and now I have like 30 options every time to choose from.
I tried to delete the undesired languages (for example, es_ES or en_AZ) but even if I sign as a super user I am not allow to remove the files.

Thanks

[M (nefilims)]

I have the same problem.

I run Ubuntu 9.04 with Firefox 3.0.10 and OpenOffice 3.0.1.

I have installed the language support for English, French, Spanish and German, using UK English for menus and windows.
The spell checking in Firefox always offers me a list of languages so long that it spreads out of the top and bottom borders of the screen.
Some languages always appear twice, once with the short abbreviated denomination (en_GB), and once with the long name (English / United Kingdom).

In the Tools > Adds-on > Dictionaries, I have Firefox(DE), Firefox(en-GB), Firefox(es-ES), Firefox(fr).
I also had Firefox(ES-AR), Xulrunner(DE), Xulrunner(en-GB), Xulrunner(es-ES), Xulrunner(fr) and Xulrunner(ES-AR) but I disabled them, with no change.

There is no dictionaries or language shown in Tools > Adds-on > Extensions.

Keep up the good work !

[Jure Merhar (jmerhar)]

I had the same problem.

This is how I fixed it:

I deleted the /usr/lib/firefox-3.0.12/dictionaries symlink and created a directory with the same name. I then symlinked only the following files from /usr/share/myspell/dicts to /usr/lib/firefox-3.0.12/dictionaries:
- en-GB.aff
- en-GB.dic
- hyph_en_GB.dic
- hyph_sl_SI.dic
- sl-SI.aff
- sl-SI.dic

The language list in firefox is now almost as I want it to be:
English / United States
English / United Kingdom
Slovenian / Slovenia

All I need to do now, is to get rid of "English / United States", but I don't know how to do that. Any ideas?

[Jure Merhar (jmerhar)]

The problem with this approach is, you have to do it every time firefox gets upgraded.

[OrelEagle (oreleagle)]

Hello,

This bug is not a duplicate of bug #66015, as #66015 is fixed. This one is still valid: when you select en_gb, you get all other English languages.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.