Check spelling with several dictionaries

[ariasuni]

• Change/feature request

Some software (macOS, Telegram, Chromium/Google Chrome, etc.) provide the ability to check the spelling of a text by using several dictionaries, to accommodate people using several languages in the same text (because they happen to be polyglot and change language from sentence to sentence or paragraph to paragraph), or writing twice the same text in different languages (think: announcement, blog post, message on social media, etc.).

I personally regularly use both French and English, and (in the context of e.g. Firefox) it’s very annoying to go back and forth between the two languages for spell checking, underlining alternatively in red one part of my text or the other.

But the most frequent problem I encounter is probably the fact that even if I don’t mix the two languages in one text area, I have to regularly switch between the two languages because e.g. on social media I write posts/messages in a language or the other, depending of who I’m responding to, in which language it’s easier to say my thing, or which is more relevant for the specific thing I want to say.

I’m not sure what other users would want from this feature, but here are a few things that I think could be great:

• Knowing in which language the suggestion is (e.g. to label them in a UI)
• Getting suggestions even if it’s spelled correctly (e.g. to manually check spelling by right-clicking on a word)

[PanderMusubi]

Thanks for your question. However, this is out of scope for the following reason. They way rule based spell checking with affixes works is that contradicting results can emerge in spelling correctness and suggestions from different languages. This is not simply looking up words in lists of which the results can be added on a pile. One could do this from the application from which the spell checking is called, but that is not the domain of Nuspell anymore.

If you are interested in discussions about this, please read:

• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=69687
• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=676500
• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=616108

Several ways of dealing with it are discussed there, also add-ons for Firefox and Thunderbird to deal with this are named there.

[dimztimz]

It's doable, as a new API (new class in the C++ code). It needs careful design, there is no one straightforward way of doing it. Reopening for some time in some future.