Spelling checks in Firefox

[Cath O'Deray]

My preferences for Firefox and LanguageTool should allow automated checks.

Checks do not occur:

• LanguageTool presents a red alert (first screenshot)
• Firefox fails silently (second shot).

Affected sites include:

• <https://bsd.to/>
• <https://pastebin.com/>
• The FreeBSD Forums.

Multiple Firefox profiles are affected.

Does anyone else have the same issues?

% pkg iinfo firefox
firefox-120.0.1,2
% uname -aKU
FreeBSD mowa219-gjp4-zbook-freebsd 15.0-CURRENT FreeBSD 15.0-CURRENT #5 main-n266797-0a958aa16fed-dirty: Mon Dec  4 04:49:51 GMT 2023     grahamperrin@mowa219-gjp4-zbook-freebsd:/usr/obj/usr/src/amd64.amd64/sys/GENERIC-NODEBUG amd64 1500005 1500005
%

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<https://languagetool.org/#plugins>

My LanguageTool service is local, if that's relevant.

the quick brown spellingmistakez jumped over the lazy dog​

 

[Cath O'Deray]

In old Reddit, the context menu option is present, but not preselected:

Context:

Why doesn't spell check work?

I'm using Firefox on Windows 11 and spellcheck isn't working at all, I have "Check your spelling as you type" enabled but I'm forced to copy/paste...

old.reddit.com

I wonder whether there's a platform-specific bug upstream.

 

[YYY__]

Does spell checker work on at least one website?

For Firefox, we need to:

• The UI language is not the dictionary language.
• Not all local dictionaries are installed automatically.
• Check "about:config -> layout.spellcheckDefault" (1 multi-line, 2 single-line, 0 disabled).
• Check "about:config -> spellchecker.dictionary". Switching dictionaries.
• resource://gre/dictionaries/

Update:

LanguageTool addon:
See the add-on's advanced settings. It appears to be a client-server model. You can set up a cloud server (languagetool.org), a local server, or an external server.

Error 500 for the local server. It should probably run in java.

Localhost server works for LibreOffice but not for Firefox, Thunderbird and Chromium

Hi, Some information about my operating system: My operating system: Linux Mint 20.3 based on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. Firefox version: 120.0, LanguageTool extension 8.3.0. Thunderbird version: 115.5.0, LanguageTool extension 8.3.0. Chromium version: 119.0.6045.159, LanguageTool extension 8.3.0...

forum.languagetool.org

 

[Cath O'Deray]

Thanks!

<https://forum.languagetool.org/t/-/9533/6?u=grahamperrin>

I'll log out from Plasma before reviewing the checker that's integral to Firefox.

 

[Cath O'Deray]

layout.spellcheckDefault 1

spellchecker.dictionary en-GB

Firefox can’t find the file at jar:file:///usr/local/lib/firefox/omni.ja!/dictionaries.

 

[YYY__]

After researching:

resource://gre/dictionaries refers to the dictionary installed by default next to the Firefox installer location.

Oops!:

Probably, the global Check spelling when typing option is using the dictionary included with the installer language. I can't guess anything else.
I have en-US.aff and en-US.dic for resources://gre/dictionaries/, for my Spanish-UI in Debian. I can't find where FF stores that file, but the contents of en-US.dic differ from the /usr/local/hunspel/en-US.dic file.

In my case it doesn't check by default either, I have to click on the context menu.

It may be the omni.ja file related to your error:
file /usr/lib/firefox-esr/omni.ja /usr/lib/firefox-esr/omni.ja: Zip archive data, at least v1.0 to extract, compression method=store

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On the other hand, Firefox handles dictionaries in two ways:

First of all,

"about:config -> spellchecker.dictionary_path": In my case, I'm writing this from Linux/Firefox 115.5.0esr, and it shows /usr/share/hunspell, i.e. it uses the underlying spell checker to the system.

Second,

you can install any other dictionary as an add-on by clicking the Add Dictionaries option from the Languages context menu, which will take you to the page that shows "about:config -> browser.dictionaries.download.url".
As for "about:config -> spellchecker.dictionary", it has weird behavior, first it appeared as "true" or I mistook it with "services.sync.prefs.sync.spellchecker.dictionary", then it appeared with "ES,,", then I've deleted it and it has no effect on the spell checker.

To conclude, simply click on the dictionaries in the Languages context menu you want to check, which appears when you click Check Spelling. It seems to work for more than one language.

 

[Cath O'Deray]

The checker works, but not as I type. I must stop typing to begin the check.

Maybe I should test with LanguageTool disabled.