Set DEFAULT spellcheck language
Running Ubuntu 13.04, firefox can't help but highlight every word red every time I type into a textbox, because the top entry in RIGHTCLICK>>LANGUAGES is "French". The others read, in order, "French (Belgium)", "English (United Kingdom)", "French (Luxembourg)", "English (United States)", "French (Swiss)", "French (France)", "English (South Africa)", "French (Canada)", "Persian", "Persian (Iran)", "English (Australia)". Now I don't deny that I may have gone on a splurge many years ago having discovered new languages' spellcheck. Whatever the case, I want to be rid of all but "English (United States)", "Persian (Iran)", and "French (France)", in that order, with "English (United States)" as the DEFAULT.
Unfortunately, the first option ("French") is the default, which means that every textbox I go to, regardless of what I chose in the previous textbox, the spellcheck language is reset to French. There are no firefox addons that would suggest a change in language, other than perhaps Ubuntu Firefox Modifications, Ubuntu Online Accounts, Unity Desktop Integration, or Unity Websites integration that I can fathom would change the default spellcheck language, nor any such plugins or languages. about:config shows spellchecker.dictionary as a user-set en_US, and EDIT>>PREFERENCES>>CONTENT>>LANGUAGES shows, "in order of preference", en-us, en, fa, and ar; though I don't think the latter is related to my problem, since webpages show in the correct language; it's just the spellcheck.
Chosen solution
hello helasraizam, it should be possible to remove certain installed spellchecker entried from about:addons under "dictionaries".
i don't know how to influence the order of remaining entries though & would have recommended setting spellchecker.dictionary manually as well. if this didn't help yet you also might want to clear the "site preferences" part of your history, since the preferred spell checker-language might be stored on a per-site basis: Delete browsing, search and download history on Firefox
Read this answer in context 👍 1All Replies (8)
Suluhisho teule
hello helasraizam, it should be possible to remove certain installed spellchecker entried from about:addons under "dictionaries".
i don't know how to influence the order of remaining entries though & would have recommended setting spellchecker.dictionary manually as well. if this didn't help yet you also might want to clear the "site preferences" part of your history, since the preferred spell checker-language might be stored on a per-site basis: Delete browsing, search and download history on Firefox
You can also try to check the /usr/share/hunspell/ directory.
Thanks! This is filled with all of the languages I don't want. Can I just delete the .dic and .aff files?
File list:
- fr_{LU,FR,CH,CA,BE}.{aff,dic} and fr.{dic,aff}
- fa_IR.{aff,dic} and fa.{aff,dic}
- en_{ZA,US,GB,AU}.{aff,dic} (curiously, no en.{dic/aff})
If you do not need to use them in other programs then I assume that there is nothing against deleting them or see if you can uninstall them via the software management of your distribution.
As it turns out, OpenOffice and Firefox both use the same spellcheckers, namely hunspell and myspell, of which I have the following packages:
- myspell-en-{au,gb,za}, which who knows how those got checked in Synaptic,
- myspell-fa and myspell-fr, which I added myself.
- hunspell-en-us
After uninstalling myspell-en-{au,gb,za} in Synaptic, my English spellcheck is only us (presumably from hunspell), as I would like. I didn't uninstall FA or FR because I would like them for both OO and ff. Since I won't need it in ff or OO, I also removed fr_{CH,CA,BE}.{dic,aff} from /usr/share/hunspell.
Finally, it seems that I was mistaken about the spellchecker.dictionary option in about:config, and that this does set the default value, as sites are now showing "en_US" as the default spellchecker upon right click. So philipp was right!
Thank you both for solving my problem!
While cor-el's reply showed me how to remove the extra languages, it turns out that the spellcheck preferences really do seem to be on a per-site basis. I skeptically followed your instructions for removing browser settings history and saw that spellchecker wasn't enabled, and when enabled no language was selected, but upon selection the same language was selected even as I reloaded the browser. I guess it makes sense to have it that way, so French sites are spellchecked in French, etc. Thanks a bunch!
This default is likely set via a language attribute in the page code, see the page source of this page
<html class="no-js" lang="en-US" dir="ltr">
I had the exact same problem with Firefox with it defaulting to French all the time. I reinstalled the US dictionary so that it would show up under addon:plugins/Dictionaries and that set it to be the default. This problem plagued me for WEEKS!!!