QtWebEngine supports spellchecking: https://doc.qt.io/qt-5/qtwebengine-features.html#spellchecker However, they have helpfully decided (steered by upstream chromium) to *not* use hunspell dictionaries, and instead to use... hunspell dictionaries stored in /usr/share/qt/qtwebengine_dictionaries/ as ".bdic" files, because this is supposedly "more efficiently read by chromium". (Actually QtWebEngine's spell-checking infrastructure is entirely willing to read dictionaries in /usr/bin/qtwebengine_dictionaries before looking in /usr/share because clearly they've put great thought into how this is all supposed to work on a conceptual design level especially for distro packaging.) So I have a program -- pageedit -- which just added spellchecking support via qtwebengine in the latest release, and I would like to support that. And I don't want to see people being personally responsible for installing their own stuff in /usr/share. While I'm at it, Morten (Foxboron) pointed out to me that qutebrowser also supports spellchecking, and it currently provides a user script which downloads preconverted dictionaries from chromium's git repository into $HOME/.local/share/qutebrowser/ ... because there's apparently no guidance or precedent for actually distributing these dictionaries. (In fact, currently only Fedora seems to make these dictionaries available to users.) It's possible to convert them yourself, using the qwebengine_convert_dict tool shipped in the qt5-webengine package. I think it would be nice if users were able to obtain these dictionaries properly, but I'm not positive what the best way would be. Ideas: - Ship a pacman hook to convert whatever the user has installed, implemented via the following libalpm script and hooks: https://paste.xinu.at/m-ydTjU/ - make every hunspell-* package makedepend on qt5-webengine and produce those dictionaries - same thing but also make split packages for basically a tiny data file - force users to install an out of date AUR package not kept in sync with hunspell-* (this one is just a joke) The advantage of a hook is that users with webengine installed automatically get magic google-approved dictionaries corresponding to the hunspell dictionaries they have installed. The advantage of modifying each hunspell-* package is saving about 0.38 seconds per file at installation time, plus users don't have weird untracked files in some cloistered dir in /usr/ The advantage of doing anything other than possibility #3 is "avoid adding another 34 packages to the repositories, which users need to manually install in addition to the other dictionaries they explicitly installed". ... Prior art: Fedora uses rpm post-install filetriggers: https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/qt5-qtwebengine/blob/master/f/qt5-qtweben... Gentoo has a proposal for a package that runs the conversion tool on each file the user has installed in /usr/share/hunspell/ and packages the results. ... Thoughts on the best way forward to make these dictionaries available on Arch Linux? -- Eli Schwartz Bug Wrangler and Trusted User