GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 572951
ligatures (i.e. fi, fl) not handled very nicely by spell checker
Last modified: 2010-01-05 14:46:31 UTC
the bug has been opened on https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/333656 "Spell checking on a UTF8 document with ligatures in (i.e. fi, fl as a single character as in files, defining, flow) aren't handled very nicely. They get flagged up as spelling errors, even though to a human, they're obviously not. Strangely, search does the correct thing and, for example, searching for flow does the correct thing. gedit 2.25.7-0ubuntu1"
I am not sure we should do some special handling with those strings: I think the spell checker should take care of handling those. Btw, I tried to do g_utf8_normalize (word, -1, G_NORMALIZE_DEFAULT) on the string but that does not transform "files" in "files" so it does not help (Here I'd like to CC dom, author of enchant, but I could not find his bugzilla mail)
I'm not sure that anyone should do special handling with those strings. Sure, ligatures are esthetically pleasing visually. That's why tools like Pango turn "fi" "fl" "ffl" and etc. into ligatures for display. However, you shouldn't be using ligatures in your text files. Ligatures are *glyphs* comprised of multiple characters. That is, you should be using the "fi" and "fl" characters in your text files and let Pango remap them. Spell checkers operate at the character/letter level, not the glyph level.