[CentOS] Having less languages in Firefox (hunspell dictionaries provide too many locales)

Mon Nov 21 15:03:58 UTC 2011
Thomas Johansson <thomasj at isy.liu.se>

On 2011-11-21 13:43, Mathieu Baudier wrote:
> Hello,
>
> on CentOS 6, I am routinely writing mails in English, German and
> French and using the related hunspell dictionaries for the spelling in
> Firefox (I'm using Google Apps).
>
> This works fine but the problem is that languages are added for all
> the possible locales (English US, UK, Philippines, Bostwana, Trinidad
> and Tobago, Denmark (sic!), ... and German Germany, Austria... and
> French France, Canada, Belgium...).
>
> So each time I want to switch from one language to the other (which
> sometimes happens every few minutes), I need to choose in a very long
> list (with non-deterministic ordering).
> First I thought it was no big deal, but with time I realize this is a
> loss of time and concentration which while not big is recurrent.
>
> Does anybody knows how I could reduce the list to English UK, German
> Germany and French France?
> (no offence to the other locales)
>

Most of the dictionaries are symlinks from other basefiles. I have used 
these lines in my postinstall to remove dictionaries

echo "Remove excessive spell checking lists"
cd /usr/share/myspell
find . -type l -exec rm {} \;
\rm -f de_AT.* de_CH.* en_CA.* ko_KR.*

That will give you a much smaller list of dictionaries in thunderbird.

   ls -1 /usr/share/myspell/*.dic
   /usr/share/myspell/de_DE.dic
   /usr/share/myspell/en_GB.dic
   /usr/share/myspell/en_US.dic
   /usr/share/myspell/fr_FR.dic
   /usr/share/myspell/it_IT.dic
   /usr/share/myspell/sv_SE.dic

Remove more stuff if you want a shorter list. Just add sv_SE.* and 
it_IT.* to the rm line to remove swedish and italian dictionaries. The 
drawback of this solution is obvious when an update arrives and the list 
become populated again.


/Thomas