Bug 75734 - Spell checking doesn't warn users if the selected dictionary isn't installed, but rather returns a potentially incorrect result
Summary: Spell checking doesn't warn users if the selected dictionary isn't installed,...
Status: NEW
Alias: None
Product: LibreOffice
Classification: Unclassified
Component: Linguistic (show other bugs)
Version: 4.1.5.3 release
Hardware: All All
: high enhancement
Assignee: Not Assigned
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Reported: 2014-03-04 00:28 UTC by David H. Gutteridge
Modified: 2014-03-07 04:57 UTC (History)
1 user (show)

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Description David H. Gutteridge 2014-03-04 00:28:06 UTC 
LibreOffice shouldn't pretend to spell check something when it's lacking the dictionary it's been asked to use. It should explicitly tell the user it can't proceed. There are many confused users encountering this issue, from what I've seen on many forum postings and many bug reports that have been submitted here.

LibreOffice should check for the presence of the required dictionary before starting the spell check and provide a meaningful error message if it's not found. Instead the spell check runs and reports no issues were found, which is quite misleading.

(The steps to reproduce are quite simple: just change the associated dictionary of selected text in a document to be any dictionary that isn't installed and run the spell check.)

I'm surprised no one's filed a bug that points this out already, but I couldn't find anything in the bug list. My apologies if I missed something. Responses are typically that users should download the necessary dictionary separately, which is all well and good, but the software itself should be telling them it can't complete the action requested. There'd be fewer duplicate bug reports about missing dictionaries if this was the case.
Comment 1 David H. Gutteridge 2014-03-04 00:36:30 UTC 
I should add, I realize there's more than one means to invoke spell checking, since a user could have the "check as you go" feature enabled, or they could explicitly start an interactive spell checking session. At a minimum, I think the latter should pop up a warning indicating it has no dictionary to work with. (And if a document has multiple languages, it could trigger multiple times, so I realize this isn't the simplest thing to make elegant...)
Comment 2 Joel Madero 2014-03-07 04:57:16 UTC 
Thank you for reporting this enhancement request! I can confirm that this is a valid enhancement request on:
Version: 4.3.0.0.alpha0+ Build ID: 84862db95a5e22b9ef89baa2a8a5deeffefbdef6
Date:   Tue Feb 25 19:58:48 2014 +0100 
Platform: Ubuntu Linux 13.10 x64
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As I've been able to confirm the enhancement request I am marking as:

New (confirmed)
Enhancement
High - seems like a useful thing to have for many users, no dictionary should result in some kind of a warning if you try to do a spell check.

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