Hello,

in Kmail I can do spellchecking. My mother tongue is Polish, so I want to be able to spellcheck Polish texts. However, in the list of possible dictionaries (which I enabled using "view -> dictionary" in message composition window) there isn't Polish dictionary. I read in the Internet that kmail does spellcheck using Sonnet and that Sonnet uses ispell or aspell. I don't have ispell installed but I do have aspell installed. I installed polish dictionary for aspell ("# apt-get install aspell-pl"), and some dictionaries more. Now aspell tells me that these dictionaries are installed:

Code: Select all

$ aspell dump dicts
cs
en
en-variant_0
(...)
pl
ru


However, when I look at dictionaries' list in kmail, I can see only five choices: empty, France, Canada, USA, Switzerland, Great Britain. On this list there isn't Polish, Russian or Czech dictionary. I tried to restart KMail and even to restart computer, but it didn't help.

What can I do? How can I investigate the problem further? I use Debian testing, KMail 1.12.4, KDE 4.3.4.

I've no experience of this, but here is my suggestion. Start with systemsettings > Count/Region & Language - and add Polish to your languages. Then, still there, go to the spell-checking section and see whether Polish appears on the list under Default language. Not sure how far that will take you but it's worth a try.

annew wrote:I've no experience of this, but here is my suggestion. Start with systemsettings > Count/Region & Language - and add Polish to your languages. (...)

Thanks for your suggestion, but it doesn't help - I already had Polish in my languages in that section of systemsettings.

I've asked around without success so far. I can only think of one more person that might know. I'll email him now.

Well, I have a reply, but it's not good.
<quote>
I'm afraid that I don't know why it doesn't work for him. I have just
installed the Czech, Polish and Russian aspell dictionaries and after a
restart (!) of KMail the dictionaries are available in KMail.

If he did restart KMail then I don't know where else to look.</quote>

Sorry, but if this man can't help you, I don't know who can. On the KMail side no-one knows the application better than he does. It might be worth checking with your distro, in case there is any distro-specific setting that is needed to tell KMail where to look - although I'd be surprised if that were the case.

It may also be worth checking for and removing any *aspell* files under $HOME.

So for now I'll just give up - I don't need this feature *so* much. It's pity kmail is written in compiled language - if it was written in Python I could more easily debug it. But then it would be probably slower...
Thanks a lot for your willingness to help me, for your time and effort!

Sorry we didn't have a resolution for you. I believe the next version of KMail, the Akonadi-based one, uses a different method for handling dictionaries, so may be you'll have more success with that.

Greetings from the future.

As of late 2014 and using KDE 4.11.5 (OpenSUSE 13.1), the way to get new dictionaries going under KMail and any other KDE applications seems to be installing the corresponding myspell dictionary. KDE does not seem to care one bit about any of the other spellcheckers you may have, aspell, ispell, hunspell (excellent), ... it just wants myspell for some unknown reason.

HTH.