Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

JustGreg · Joined: 24 May 2005 Posts: 651 Location: Connecticut USA

Sylpheed has no native spelling checker. It should be possible to use the GNU program aspell. I have searched the forum and found information on aspell with Opera and aspell with Claws, but nothing on it and Sylpheed. Thank you in advance for any help.

smokey01 · Joined: 30 Dec 2006 Posts: 1605 Location: South Australia

I would be happy just to get Sylpheed to work.

I haven't managed to get it to work under puppy 4.0. It will not connect to my mail server.

rcrsn51 · Posted: Sun 01 Jun 2008, 17:41 Post subject:

Neither could I. So I went back to Thunderbird which has built-in spell checking and always works. For some reason, people like to use the B-word with Thunderbird, but I would rather sacrifice a few MB of hard drive space for something usable.

prehistoric · Joined: 23 Oct 2007 Posts: 1210

@JustGreg,

There are versions of Sylpheed with built-in spell checking, but the ones making it into Puppy packages generally don't have it. I can't comment on Sypheed under 4.0 because I'm not running that, but I have long used it under 3.01 with a hack that gives me simple spell checking, if not the best interface. I have defined the external editor, (common preferences->details->external commands) as follows:

JustGreg · Joined: 24 May 2005 Posts: 651 Location: Connecticut USA

Thanks, prehistoric for the information. I did get it working. To make it complete, one has to install aspell-0.60.5.pet (program) and aspell-en-6.0.pet (english dictionary), first.. Both are located in puppy 3 pet (ftp://ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/puppylinux/pet_packages-3) section ibiblio.org.

In Sylpheed, one opens the Configuration menu, selects "Common Preferences", clicks on the detail tab and then for the external editor, one enters rxvt -e aspell -c %s.

To check the spelling, in the compose window, one clicks on the external editor button. This starts aspell in rxvt terminal window. You make the corrections in rxvt. When it ends, Sylpheed has the message in the Compose window with the correct spelling.

This replaces the external editor function with the spelling checking, aspell.

I had no problems with setting up Sylpheed. I initially could not connect to my server. I traced the problem to a misspelling of SMTP as STMP in the server entry! You see why I need a spelling checker. I would check the account settings. I was also able to import my Seamonkey mail folders directly. I had to export the Seamonkey address book as a LDIF file, then I could import it into Sylpheed. It took about a half hour.

I hope this helps.

Wolf Pup · Joined: 27 Apr 2006 Posts: 637

You could try this and see if it works, (includes aspell, aspell-en. and gtkspell.)

spellchecker_addon.pet
md5sum

installing that gives opera spell checking ablility, also pidgin too.

Fossil · Posted: Mon 02 Jun 2008, 05:23 Post subject:

This may not be relevant to Puppy 4. I'm using Sylpheed 2.3.1 with Puppy 2.17. The email program has a corresponding spell checker - Sylpheed-2.3.1 gtkspell.pup - which once installed, works internally within Sylpheed, marking any incorrectly spelt words immediately they are typed.
Configuration, Compose, enable spell checking [X], Default language EN.

prehistoric · Joined: 23 Oct 2007 Posts: 1210

Thanks, Wolf_Pup and Fossil,

That's a better solution, just need to see where it works. I'm not sorry I posted my hack, though. For those cases where you want to get added functionality without writing code, the trick of redefining an existing external command comes in handy. You can use this for other purposes. It has been around since my old Unix days, when user interfaces were slowly chipped out of granite.

prehistoric

JustGreg · Joined: 24 May 2005 Posts: 651 Location: Connecticut USA

Thanks Wolfpup and Fossil for the suggestions. I tried the spellchecker_addon.pet and could not get gtkspell to work. The program aspell work normally and using Prehistoric hack, it worked fine with Slypheed.

Fossil, there have been a lot of changes between Puppy 2.17 and Puppy 4.0. The pup package may work. I have tried pup packages before with Puppy 4.0 and generally they did not work. I could not find the package. So I did not try. But thank you for the suggestion.

prehistoric · Joined: 23 Oct 2007 Posts: 1210

@Wolf_Pup,

I just tried the spellcheck_addon.pet with Slypheed 2.2.7 under 3.02 alpha 6, (which is basically still a 3.01 system.) No luck. I have Opera 9.27 installed, and remember from before that I did not need gtkspell, only aspell, to make spell checking work with that. We may have a conflict with different versions of gtkspell.

If you produce a new package it would be helpful to have a command line call to invoke gtkspell. Looking through that pet it seemed there were gtk function calls, but no way to invoke it from the command line. Using a hack, with gtkspell in place of bare aspell, would give a nicer interface even on versions of Sylpheed, or other programs, which do not have a call to gtkspell built in.

Fossil · Posted: Mon 02 Jun 2008, 17:10 Post subject:

@JustGreg - and for anyone who still uses an older Series 2 Puppy.
The Sylpheed-2.3.1 gtkspell.pup can be found here: http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?p=74916&sid=839d2efc3a0876cfa72c4aa9dcf51bd7

JustGreg · Joined: 24 May 2005 Posts: 651 Location: Connecticut USA

Thank you, Fossil for the web site information. I will put it on the "to do" list and report back.