Support spell checking multiple languages in parallel

[sebastian-de]

Thanks a lot for creating Katvan! Coming from Kile (for LaTeX) this is exactly what I'm looking for.

The only thing I have problems with is spell checking. I use English as my Interface language, but I often write texts in German.

1. In the UI I'm only offered English as spell checking options, although a German hunspell dictionary is installed. I'm using the Flatpak, so this might actually be a Flatpak issue (I have set flatpak config --user languages --set "en;de").

2. It would also be great to use multiple dictionaries in parallel like it's done in Kate for example:

Kate uses Sonnet instead of default Qt spell checking, I don't know if this would be an option for Katvan as well.

• https://invent.kde.org/frameworks/sonnet
• https://develop.kde.org/docs/features/spellchecking/

I don't know how well Sonnet supports bidirectional text, though.

[IgKh]

Thanks for reporting the issue.

About the Flatpak thing, I checked and Katvan is looking for dictionaries in the right place which is /usr/share/hunspell inside the sandbox. This directory is seemingly full of dictionary files but they are actually a maze of broken symbolic links leading to /usr/share/runtime/locale/ - where indeed only entries for the languages I have configured on my system actually appear.

I tried your flatpak config command to add another language and it did not change anything immediately. But re-installing the Flatpak seemed to have changed something (but not always). I basically have zero idea how the locale configuration in Flatpak is supposed to work, and I can't find any clear documentation about that 🤷‍♂️ . Sorry - can't help any further other than confirming that Katvan seemingly looks at the right place.

Regarding Sonnet: There is no "default Qt spell checking" as such. Our spell checker on Linux is completely custom work built directly on top of hunspell (and the native platform APIs on Windows and macOS). I generally don't like to take dependency on KDE Framework libraries because they are a little awkward to work with on non-Linux platforms, but the spell checking backend is Linux specific anyway so that won't be an issue. I'll need to look at if/how it can be integrated.

[sebastian-de]

Thank you for your detailed reply.

I didn't have the idea to check the hunspell files inside the sandbox. Turns out Flatpak with mixed locales can be tricky. After reading through flatpak/flatpak#5497 I found out what was causing this: I have set flatpak config --user languages --set "en;de", but installed Katvan and its runtime as a system package. In this case this option doesn't have any effect. After setting flatpak config languages --set "en;de" (without --user) and running flatpak update the correct org.kde.Platform.Locale gets installed and I can choose German dictionaries in Katvan.

This also explains the many broken links in /usr/share/hunspell: The symbolic links themselves are part of the runtime, but their respective target only becomes available when the appropriate locale extension is installed.

Sonnet-like multi-language support for spell-checking would still be great, though. But it's a nice to have feature, so feel free to close this.