Spell checker not working

[xsmile]

Due to the disabled automatic download function of dictionaries, Inox is missing them and spell checking is not working.

System hunspell dictionaries cannot be used with chromium because it uses a custom file format. They can be converted though.

To manually install a dictionary offered by Google, get a language-spcecific *.bdic file from https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/deps/hunspell_dictionaries/+/master, place it in ~/.config/inox/Dictionaries and restart the browser.

[Eloston]

How feasible is it to modify the Chromium code to use system hunspell libraries?

[DragoonAethis]

I think it might be easier to write an external script that downloads the requested dictionary. This file describes how to convert the dictionaries using a script not available in the Chromium repo, and they in fact are using Hunspell, just with a custom dictionary format. Here's their Hunspell fork with google.patch (that alone being almost 1K of new code, modifying a few Hunspell components) and google/bdict* being the format reader/writer. Not sure if anyone really wants to patch and maintain that.

[Eloston]

@DragoonAethis The page you linked says the hunspell code has moved here. According to README.chromium, it seems that most of the modifications are optimizations or slight usability enhancements. I just dug through some Chromium code and Hunspell doesn't seem too tightly integrated, so I'll consider writing a patch at some point in the future.

[simonorono]

What's the status of this issue?

[Eloston]

I can't speak for gcarq, but I haven't done anything related to this yet. I haven't been working on anything Chromium-related recently.

[gcarq]

There is also no status update from my side

[Eloston]

I've looked into this more, and it'll take more work than I originally thought. There are two main files that need to be refactored:

• chrome/browser/spellchecker/spellcheck_hunspell_dictionary.cc - Needs refactoring to read Hunspell dictionaries from the system instead of downloading and reading BDict dictionaries. This includes converting a Chromium language string to a language code for Hunspell dictionaries (something similar to what's in components/spellcheck/common/spellcheck_common.cc).
• components/spellcheck/renderer/hunspell_engine.cc - Needs refactoring to use the system Hunspell interface instead of Google's Hunspell library //third_party/hunspell. Google's Hunspell library can't be used since it's been changed to use BDict dictionaries.

There are some other things as well, such as removing GN references to //third_party/hunspell, dynamically linking the Hunspell library, and implementing detection of system Hunspell dictionaries.

I don't have time right now to figure all of this out, so hopefully someone else that's interested can take over.