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Spell Checker in Thunderbird has never been very good

Discussion of features in Mozilla Thunderbird
Rorschwihr
 
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August 29th, 2008, 7:50 am

Post Posted August 29th, 2008, 7:50 am

I really love Thunderbird and Lightning. Every release gets better and better. The only consistant issue through all of the releases has been the quality of the spell checker. It is the pits in comparision to my experience with other applications. I spend too much time cutting and pasting into an old 1994 SoftKey 16-bit production of the American Heritage Dictionary v3.6 and now that I will be switching to Linux it will no longer be available for me to augment the T-bird spell checker in this way. Without my work-a-round crutch I will need to rely more on T-bird's flawed spell checking capability. Any chance they will get a better engine? My old 1993 FaxWorks spell checker was also far superior. It is hard for me to believe that 15 years later Mozilla cannot come up with something more worthy of such a fine overall product. Thanks for listening,
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DanRaisch
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August 29th, 2008, 8:20 am

Post Posted August 29th, 2008, 8:20 am

I removed your email address from your post. We do not give email support on this forum. To do so would deprive other users of the information offered in a response to your topic. More importantly, spammers harvest email addresses from public forums like this.
Dan Raisch Vista Home Premium 64, FF 3.5.5, TB 2.0.0.23

Rorschwihr
 
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September 6th, 2009, 8:11 pm

Post Posted September 6th, 2009, 8:11 pm

Thanks Dan;
However I never did get a response as to why the T-bird spell checker is so unhelpful. Thanks,
Rorschwihr

James
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September 6th, 2009, 8:37 pm

Post Posted September 6th, 2009, 8:37 pm

Thunderbird 2.0 still uses the MySpell while Thunderbird 3.0 (like Firefox 3.0 and newer) will be using the better HunSpell. Also Mozilla does not maintain the dictionaries.

Rorschwihr
 
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September 6th, 2009, 9:05 pm

Post Posted September 6th, 2009, 9:05 pm

Thanks James! Great to hear. When is a general release version of Thunderbird 3.0 due to hit the street?
Rorschwihr

wsm
 
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November 7th, 2009, 8:51 pm

Post Posted November 7th, 2009, 8:51 pm

v3 hopefully available in a few weeks. Watch at http://mozillamessaging.com/ and http://planet.mozillamessaging.com/

As someone with a keen interest in spell check, I would encourage you to get involved and contact any of the people in the bugs which have been fixed in the past two years about how you might be able to help in the bugs that are still open

roparr2

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November 7th, 2009, 10:59 pm

Post Posted November 7th, 2009, 10:59 pm

I'm an incredible speller, but a lousy typist. I've installed AutoCorrect, and I'm inserting my most common typing errors in addition to the original entries.
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wsm
 
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November 8th, 2009, 5:31 am

Post Posted November 8th, 2009, 5:31 am

roparr2 wrote:I'm an incredible speller, but a lousy typist. I've installed AutoCorrect, and I'm inserting my most common typing errors in addition to the original entries.


roparr2, thanks for that idea. An updated version is cited here http://forum.addonsmirror.net/index.php ... topic=4125

roparr2

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November 8th, 2009, 9:13 am

Post Posted November 8th, 2009, 9:13 am

I've edited mine copiously for my common typos. Lots of fun!! The evil i :twisted: has been defeated.

James--Wish we had a decent spellchecker here on FF. Hun doesn't always correct typos, despite being supposedly better than Myspell. Can it be edited manually? I have an HTML editor, CoffeeCup.

Oops. the Add and Save buttons on mine just stopped working sigh
Last edited by roparr2 on November 9th, 2009, 10:42 am, edited 1 time in total.
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James
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November 8th, 2009, 2:00 pm

Post Posted November 8th, 2009, 2:00 pm

roparr2 wrote:I've edited mine copiously for my common typos. Lots of fun!! The evil i :twisted: has been defeated.

James--Wish we had a decent spellchecker here on FF. Hun doesn't always correct typos, despite being supposedly better than Myspell. Can it be edited manually? I have an HTML editor, CoffeeCup.

Oops. the Add and Save buttons on mine just stopped working sigh

It may not be the spell checker but whether the words you think are correct are in the dictionary the spellchecker is using. You can manually add words to the persdict.dat file in you Profile http://kb.mozillazine.org/persdict.dat

roparr2

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November 8th, 2009, 2:21 pm

Post Posted November 8th, 2009, 2:21 pm

That's what I meant. I know the spellchecker uses the dictionary. I add words, but the dictionary often gives wrong substitutes for typos. Not really a typo checker. We need something like the AutoCorrect we have in TB, which works differently. For instance, i will never be corrected in FF, and p[ produces a string of wrong substitutions.

About persdict--all the additions are shoved together without spaces. How does FF know where each word starts and ends?
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