I am new here, apologies if this question has already published.
I am very annoyed that Firefox does not have spell checking in my own language. It used to, but some version of Firefox changed so that the old spell checker no longer worked. That was many years ago. Since no one else has taken on this task, I thought I would start doing it.
I don’t know where to start. At first, I thought I would download a ready-made language file for another language, replace the words in the file with my own language, and publish the extension. But is that enough? The platform I’m using to do this is Ubuntu.
I would be grateful for any suggestions, as this would give Firefox 5 million potential new users.
Unfortunately, I’m not aware of a single consolidated resource that explains how to build a new dictionary. Information is currently spread across a few different resources including:
Firefox’s en-US dictionary is implemented here and documented here. That may be a useful point of reference for getting a new language dictionary up and running.
I was wondering if it would be possible to start the project by taking a language version file and translating the words in the file using artificial intelligence, for example. The process would be quick if it were technically feasible. But publishing it, where and how it could be published, is another matter that I need to look into.
I don’t have first hand experience working with dictionaries, so I can’t answer your question with any confidence.
I think you might be best off looking for open dictionaries (possibly even existing hunspell dictionaries) for your desired language. A quick web search just turned up this repo: https://github.com/wooorm/dictionaries. That might allow you to hit the ground running
