Improved Dutch spell checker

[FrankC]

In Dutch, there are very, very many contractions. In fact, words can be contracted that have not been contracted before. In practice, where in English one would say/write "hammer drill price", in Dutch it would become "hamerboorprijs". Not even "hamer-boor-prijs". Even though one won't find "hamerboorprijs" in the official Dutch dictionary.

WB's Dutch spell checker marks almost all such contractions as incorrect, and they all have to be added to the Dictionary manually. Which gets annoying quite quickly, because like I said, we contract many, many words. Could that be improved? And when is the next WB version expected?

[FrankC]

PS: Firefox's spell checker generally does it correctly, recognizes the contractions and deems them correct. That would suggest that it would be 'just' a matter of an algorithm, because there is no Dutch dictionary that contains the word "ouderencriminaliteitscijfers" (seniors' crime figures). I'm hoping for a reply from one of the developers.

[Aivars]

For spell checker we are using a 3rd party library. I will contact the developers and ask whether it's possible.

[FrankC]

Thanks much for the reply, Aivars. But just to make sure: it should be all about an algorithm. For example, a house often has a front door and a back door, in Dutch a 'voordeur' and an 'achterdeur'. You won't find those words in any Dutch dictionary, only 'voor', 'achter' and 'deur'. Still, Firefox (and all other browser spell checkers and text programs) recognizes 'voordeur' and 'achterdeur' as contractions and deems them correct.

I don't know whether the 3rd party would also be one would to supply the algorithm, but that's what it should be about, not the library (= dictionary) itself. Again: just to make sure. And something new, maybe: the same principle applies to German and the Scandinavian languages, and perhaps more.

[Aivars]

In this case the library provides the checking algorithm, too, not just the word list

[FrankC]

This has not been fixed either in WB2018, I see. Rather disappointing, regarding that you have a Dutch WB interface. What's the story here?

[pmk65]

This has not been fixed either in WB2018, I see. Rather disappointing, regarding that you have a Dutch WB interface. What's the story here?

As Aivars said, the spellchecker is based on 3rd-party code/dictionary.
I don't know what version of the dictionary you are using, but you can download additional dictionaries here:
http://www.addictivesoftware.com/dl-dictionaries.htm
But it looks like the last update on the Dutch dictionary was May 5, 2004. And the latest site update was 18 March 2015
(No wonder there's no updates to the dictionaries as they charge $50 for the dictionary editor.)

[FrankC]

But it looks like the last update on the Dutch dictionary was May 5, 2004. And the latest site update was 18 March 2015
(No wonder there's no updates to the dictionaries as they charge $50 for the dictionary editor.)

It's not a matter of new words, but of algorithm. See the second post.