RFE: Soikko in Ubuntu? (Proper Finnish spellchecking for OO.org and others)

[Jarkko Oranen]

I originally posted this on the "Breezy badger development release"
forum, and was told to post it here, so devs would actually see it.
Hope it works this time. Sorry for the "dupe"; Here, slightly edited:

One thing the OO.org lacks in every distro I know is proper Finnish
spellchecking. Finnish is a language with a lot of verb declensions,
suffixes (and combinations of them) and compound words. Hence,
tranditional dictionary-based spellchecking like aspell and myspell
and whatnot are unlikely to work properly, and in practice, they don't
usually work at all. This is a huge disadvantage for Finnish people
who want to use Ubuntu. (There are only about 5 million of us, but we
have a lot of Linux users.)

Soikko is a non-free (as in speech) Finnish utility for OO.org (only
1.1 though) and other applications that handles both Finnish
spellchecking and hyphenation better than any Free alternative I know
of, and thus is the only option for those who need a proper
spellchecker. More information about it (in Finnish) at
http://users.tkk.fi/~pry/soikko/index.html. The site states soikko is
free to distribute. There is also Free software called "tmispell"
which can make soikko work with other programs.

Would it be possible to include soikko in multiverse for ease of
installation? It seems the official page has not been updated in a
long time, though. Perhaps someone should contact the author about
OO.org2 support. Perhaps I will. (Unofficial debs exist at
<http://elonen.iki.fi/code/unofficial-debs/>)

Alternatively, (I'd really like this) some Finnish Ubuntu coder geeks
could start a project to develop a Free replacement for soikko. Or
does such a project already exist?

Jarkko Oranen (Chousuke on Ubuntu forums)