User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-GB; rv:1.7.6) Gecko/20050226 Firefox/1.0.1 Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-GB; rv:1.7.6) Gecko/20050226 Firefox/1.0.1 I've been meaning to add this for a long time: The fact that thunderbird shares dictionary format with OOo, and some other apps, too, is obviously quite nice. However, the applications of course ought to share the actual dictionary files, too; installing duplicates of the dictionary files is of course not very nice. Possible courses of action 1. Search some common OOo (dictionary) install locations for dictionary files - in addition to the <install dir>/components/myspell 2. Agree with the people over at openoffice.org (and maintainers of other applications using MySpell) about a common install location used for all dictionaries (and search for them only there.) 3. Similar to above, but search common dir(s) *in addition to* current dictionary location. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce:

See also http://qa.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=51451

The shellscript attached here shows what I do today to get around this issue. I install this on /usr/lib/thunderbird/components/myspell and run it at install time, and also when open office is upgraded, in order to give thunderbird access to all OOo dictionaries via symbolic links.

is this a dupe of bug 216382 or did you split it off ?

Right. I thought I remembered that there was another report related to this, but I was unable to find anything when searching the bug database just now - or I may not have filed another report. But this report may still be seen as a "split-off". Bug 216382 is (originally) about the need to move the dictionaries *from* where they are today, based on considerations about internal organisation. This is more of a specific request about moving them *to* somewhere, based on rather different considerations (i.e. sharing data with other apps.) I think I'll let you decide whether you want to have two separate reports open based on that.

This is not only linux, though it is perhaps most useful on linux. Let's make this one depend on that one for the moment. Solution #3 is the course we are going to take (with appropriate safeguards to prevent duplicates, presumably, though I don't know exactly how to accomplish that).

This is a great enhancement! What I need most is sharing of dictionaries between Thunderbird and Firefox, but I wouldn't protest having more programs supported of course. I use webmail in Firefox in exactly the same way as I use Thunderbird, and right now I need to install my native language (Swedish) once in Firefox and once in Thunderbird. "Add to dictionary" only adds words to one of them, making adding words annoying too. I'd love for this to be a priority.

Comment 6 is Bug 355066 and Bug 226699. Let's keep this one about sharing the dictionaries with non-Mozilla applications.