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

[Øivind Hoel]

Norwegian also has alot of compound words - almost any set of related
words can and should be compounded, something aspell handles just
about as well as a person who never went to school. If I type
"Kunstkritikk" - which is the norwegian word for art critizism -
aspell corrects it to "Kunst kritikk", which is very wrong and very
annoying to clean up :-)

I'd like to see more focus on aspell and fixing this than resorting to
a non-free app (though that's probably feasible for breezy). This is
the kind of thing that users expect out of the box, and should thus be
somewhere in main, where a non-free app can't live.

On 6/11/05, Jarkko Oranen <choubaka at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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)
> 
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