GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 331806
Spell check (or word matching) is needed
Last modified: 2006-06-20 15:29:19 UTC
As part of the usefulness of a dictionary is discovering a word's correct spelling, a more helpful behavior than a message "Error while looking up definition No definitions found for '$word', is needed when a misspelled word is searched. Other information:
this has already been planned for the 2.15/16 release cycle, since we are in feature and UI freeze.
The spell checker worked fine in GNOME 2.10. Removal of this code has made this application only half as useful as it was before. *sigh*
(reply to comment #2): it was the entire code base that sucked and it needed to be rewritten from scratch. the speller widget did not made it in time for the UI freeze of 2.14, so it will be added in the next release cycle. if you want to speed up things, you can always provide a patch.
*** Bug 335817 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Emmanuele, in that case the new code base should have been punted to 2.15 and the old one used for 2.14. This is a major feature regression in the dictionary applications and an internal code rewrite should not have priority over user visible features (which some people might depend on I might add).
the whole slew of bugs that the old dictionary had - and for which we *still* receive notifications via bug-buddy, for people using 2.12 - couldn't have been solved without a rewrite. the idea was to land a feature equivalent release in time for 2.13.90; I could not make it in time for the UI freeze deadline, because I was the *only* one working on it (even though I made public announcements about the rewrite and redesign of the dictionary), and I have a life. if you cared so much about the speller widget you could have contributed a patch. and so you can still do, by the way.
Emmanuele, I'm not questioning the need for a rewrite or the lack of extra hands. I'm questioning the decision to replace the old code base with a new one before it was finished which leads to a popular feature being removed. Releasing 2.14 with the same bugs that was in 2.12 would be better than releasing 2.14 with less bugs but removing features people have come to rely on. Not that anything can be done about it now but please keep it in mind for future versions.
Also, please don't throw the "if you cared so much about the speller widget you could have contributed a patch. and so you can still do, by the way." in the face of users. It helps no one and a user getting it throwed at him will definitely think twice before submitting a bug report again. Most users of this applications won't even be developers.
(to mikael, comments #7 and #8): I replied with the "if you cared..." to you, a person who has 21 bugzilla points (far more than myself) and is listed as a developer; the other (three) bug reports about the speller widget have the same answer: "sorry, but I did not make it in time for the 2.14 release; please wait for the 2.16 release; and if you want, a patch wouldn't be rejected". which is what I answer to *all* feature requests for gnome-utils. the rationale for fixing the dictionary by rewriting has been spelled out; I tried to make a feature-equivalent release and did not make it in time - and this was *after* the merge in december, because I *did* work alone on the whole issue. sorry to disappoint you, but I'm a human being. the old dictionary was a mess, and people were not using it twice as it crashed without warning, or was a usability nigthmare; users which did (and do) file bugs were using it *despite* it being non-functional one time in three tries. features that got in the way of the re-write where removed, also to be re-designed in a cleaner and saner way. anyway, as I said: don't worry - the speller will be re-implemented in this development cycle.
*** Bug 341167 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
From the Debian BTS - reported by Javier Kohen <jkohen ## users : sourceforge : net> ---- The speller functionality of the dictionary was very useful when trying to figure out how to spell a word from its phonetic sound. It's sad that it was removed from this release without introducing a good alternative. It seems that upstream has the intention to restore this feature eventually, but sadly the dictionary is kind of crippled without it; usually you can browse a paper dictionary, but it's not even the case here. ---- I assume it's the same case.. ~marco
You can use http://www.dict.org/ which is what I ended up doing.
Can't people do without it for 6 months?
I have taken Mikael Hallendal's advice and added a custom application launcher to bring up dict.org in firefox. Works fine. -Joseph
There is a speller widget in HEAD (release 2.15.4). it needs tweaking, but it's already usable. See, just as I promised.