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Description of problem: Spell checking in kmail/kontact doesn't work reliable. It only works when I manually change it to another language and back again. Even then it's not reliable. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): $ rpm -qa kde* hunspell* aspell* | sort aspell-0.60.6-12.fc14.x86_64 hunspell-1.2.12-4.fc14.x86_64 hunspell-de-0.20091006-1.fc13.noarch hunspell-en-0.20100322-6.fc14.noarch kdebase-4.6.2-1.fc14.x86_64 kdebase-libs-4.6.2-1.fc14.x86_64 kdebase-runtime-4.6.2-1.fc14.x86_64 kdebase-runtime-flags-4.6.2-1.fc14.noarch kdebase-runtime-libs-4.6.2-1.fc14.x86_64 kde-filesystem-4-35.fc13.noarch kde-l10n-4.6.2-1.fc14.1.noarch kde-l10n-German-4.6.2-1.fc14.1.noarch kdelibs3-3.5.10-24.fc14.x86_64 kdelibs-4.6.2-1.fc14.x86_64 kdelibs-common-4.6.2-1.fc14.x86_64 kdepim3-libs-3.5.10-3.fc13.x86_64 kdepim-4.4.11.1-2.fc14.x86_64 kdepim-libs-4.4.11.1-2.fc14.x86_64 kdepimlibs-4.6.2-1.fc14.x86_64 kdepimlibs-akonadi-4.6.2-1.fc14.x86_64 kdepim-runtime-4.4.11.1-1.fc14.x86_64 kdepim-runtime-libs-4.4.11.1-1.fc14.x86_64 kde-settings-4.5-11.fc14.noarch kdeutils-minimal-4.6.2-1.fc14.x86_64 kdeutils-minimal-libs-4.6.2-1.fc14.x86_64 How reproducible: always Steps to Reproduce: 1. compose a mail 2. spell checking is set to automatic, so incorrect words should be underlined in red. 3. select Tools -> Spelling Actual results: Nothing happens, status bar claims "Spell check complete" although there are still misspelled words. Expected results: Spell checker dialog should appear and show the first misspelled word. Misspelled word should be underlined automatically. Additional info: It only works if I manually change the language in Settings -> Spellchecker to the desired language *before* I start composing the mail. If it is set to German and I want to write a German mail, I need to set it to something else, close the dialog and then open it again and change it back to German. If I change the language *after* finishing the mail, it works sometimes but most of the time not. Same for automatic spell checking: Words are only underlined if I selected the language before I wrote them. Sometimes they are not even underlined if a right click on the word will already offer spelling suggestions. This is fully reproducible for different user accounts in a German environment. I am suffering from this since F13 already and I have only seen it in Fedora.
Meanwhile I found a message on the console: kontact(7859): No language dictionaries for the language : "de" What dictionary is it looking for? And why does it only complain about a German if English is not working either?
Looks like yet another instance of the "spellchecking is broken with hunspell" bug. :-( This also affects other applications. It's invalid to request "de" as a dictionary, the app has to request a specific de_* dictionary. de_DE is not the same as de_AT or de_CH. Hunspell does not provide a de dictionary, only de_DE, de_AT and de_CH (and de_BE → de_DE, de_LI → de_CH and de_LU → de_DE symlinks). Sadly, it looks like most upstream developers still only test with the obsolete Aspell and are very poorly responding to the bugs filed about this issue. See also: * https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=171432 (Parley, reported in 2008, will be fixed only in 4.7.0) * https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=256896 (Lokalize, reported in 2010, still open) Still, we need to open another upstream bug for the KMail/Kontact issue. There's https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=189179 which looks related, but it's closed.
(BTW, English works only because something is special-casing English to account for the different en_* variants. Sadly, the fact that other languages also have national variants is widely being ignored.)
Interesting enough: After updating to F15, the problem is solved. I didn't touch my config and the package versions should be basically the same, too. However on F14 the problem still exists.
This should be at least a little better with https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/kdepim-4.4.11.1-4.fc14 which included a fix for related upstream bug http://bugs.kde.org/247486
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