I can’t spell check in Inkscape. This might be a package or dependency issue, because I don’t even have a spell check option in the Text menu or a spell check tab in the preferences menu. I can still open the spell check dialog with Ctrl+Alt+K, but it highlights every word. (There is a button in the dialog to add the word to the en_US dictionary, but even words I’ve added still get marked as wrong.) I have packages libgtkspell0, libgtkspell3-3-0, aspell, and aspell-en installed. Spell checking works fine in other programs. Am I missing something?
I’m willing to consider other options for doing my spell check, but I have over 500 short text fields in a 10MB .svg file, so manually pulling them into another program is out of the question.
Using KDE/Plasma on Tumbleweed.
Inskcape is 0.92.2
Well, from the build log:
checking Aspell not found, spell checker will be disabled…
The reason is that aspell was/is about to be dropped from the distribution because it was considered to be unmaintained upstream (even though there was a new RC released last year… :\ )
https://bugzilla.opensuse.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1052953
Therefore inkspell was changed to build with gtkspell instead:
Fri Aug 11 09:44:53 UTC 2017 - pgajdos@suse.com
- do not require aspell, require gtkspell [bsc#1052953]
But apparently it doesn’t actually support gtkspell, it seems.:sarcastic:
I can’t believe that everyone has been having this problem for a year, and nobody has noticed or posted about it. It can’t be true that Inkscape simply doesn’t support spell checking right now. It must be a problem specific to openSUSE. It needs to be rebuilt with whatever library does actually work at the moment. Maybe both just in case. Installing libraries is easy.
A year?
That change is in Tumbleweed since 6 months…
Personally I don’t use TW, and never used spellchecking in inkscape either (didn’t even know that it’s possible…).
It can’t be true that Inkscape simply doesn’t support spell checking right now. It must be a problem specific to openSUSE.
Sure.
Inkscape does support spell checking with aspell.
But openSUSE’s package is built without aspell since half a year.
And apparently inkscape doesn’t support gtkspell, that’s supposed to be used as replacement.
It needs to be rebuilt with whatever library does actually work at the moment.
The problem is that a distribution package cannot be built against libraries that are not in the distribution…
And OTOH, a library cannot be dropped from the distribution if there is a distribution package depending on it.
As there are/were plans to drop aspell (unless that changed), the responsible developers/maintainers disabled it for all applications that still used it.
Hm, strange enough, the build log contains this though:
99s] checking for gtk+-2.0 >= 2.24
99s] gtkspell-2.0... yes
So it should work?
Maybe there’s a problem with gtkspell (2.0) itself, or the dictionaries it uses?
:\
If there was a problem with gtkspell, it seems like Inkscape wouldn’t have worked since version 0.92 came out a year ago, like I said before. But, it apparently works for most people. I still haven’t been able to get it to compile (there are errors with poppler), but the configure step looks for both aspell and gtkspell. Since I have both, I don’t get any messages about spell check being disabled. I assume it would work if I could just build it.
But until 6 months ago, inkscape was built against aspell (only) in openSUSE.
So a possible problem with gtkspell (or inkscape’s gtkspell support) wouldn’t have occured (in openSUSE) a year ago.
I still haven’t been able to get it to compile (there are errors with poppler)
The openSUSE package contains this patch:
but the configure step looks for both aspell and gtkspell.
Well, if it needs both, then that’s obviously the reason for the problem.
But just because it looks for both doesn’t mean it actually needs both. Again, the openSUSE definitely wasn’t built with gtkspell before that change, only aspell.
In any case, you probably should consider writing a bug report at bugzilla.opensuse.org (same username/password as here).
Although, unless the plans have changed (aspell is still in the distribution), aspell support will probably not be added back.
Thanks for that. I doubt I would have found it. It got a lot farther, but now the build stops because ImageMagick 7.x isn’t compatible with Inkscape. (It requires 6.x.) I give up. I have learned my lesson about Tumbleweed. The system is randomly freezing for several seconds when disk access gets high, too. I’ll go back to Leap when I have a long weekend. (I borrowed a computer with Leap on it to do the spell check. It worked fine, and found a couple mistakes. It only had aspell.)
Well, the openSUSE (Tumbleweed) package is built without ImageMagick currently:
# Disabling IM until inkscape upstream supports IM7
#BuildRequires: libMagick++-devel
I suppose it would build fine if you uninstall the ImageMagick-devel package (there probably is a configure option to disable it too, no idea)…