Comment 29 for bug 997934

LibreOffice shouldn't pretend to spell check something when it's lacking the dictionary it's been asked to use. It should explicitly tell the user it can't proceed. There are many confused users encountering this issue, from what I've seen on many forum postings and many bug reports that have been submitted here.

LibreOffice should check for the presence of the required dictionary before starting the spell check and provide a meaningful error message if it's not found. Instead the spell check runs and reports no issues were found, which is quite misleading.

(The steps to reproduce are quite simple: just change the associated dictionary of selected text in a document to be any dictionary that isn't installed and run the spell check.)

I'm surprised no one's filed a bug that points this out already, but I couldn't find anything in the bug list. My apologies if I missed something. Responses are typically that users should download the necessary dictionary separately, which is all well and good, but the software itself should be telling them it can't complete the action requested. There'd be fewer duplicate bug reports about missing dictionaries if this was the case.