German spellchecking does not work

Deactivating "English" and only activating German does not work work as well.

can you please attach an image with only german enabled so that we have enough info to send it upstream.

It also happens when only German is activated. The words are all correct (and common enough that the spell checker should know it). Even "Test" is highlighted (which was valid in the "German and English" configuration).

For curiosity, I changed it to use only Norwegian (Bokmål) and it works. So this seems not to be a "non-English" problem but only one with the German locale. Which spellchecker does Empathy use? I tried hunspell on the command line for German and it worked without any problems.

Empathy uses enchant but I think they are considering another aproach

is spellchecking working using the enchant command line tool or in gedit?

This is the output of enchant

thomas@tk-laptop:~$ cat testdic.txt
Dies ist ein Test: sfff
thomas@tk-laptop:~$ enchant testdic.txt -l
sfff

Gedit also works well with German.

ok, seems it's not an enchant issue then, weird

Why is the status still "Incomplete", do you need more information from my side?

no, it just seems only you get this issue and ten thousand of bugs are waiting, it's not likely that one will get worked anytime soon by somebody not getting the bug

I did a fresh reinstall (without using the old config files) and the issue was fixed afterwards. Maybe the upgrading to Lucid was causing the confusion.

as per the reporters comments i am invalidating this bug

The same problem occurred after upgrading from Lucid to Maverick. Is there any way to reset language support and hope it will work then?

I have exactly the same problem here after a *fresh* install of Maverick: The German spell checking does not work though installed and activated. The enchant Test above works for me, too. So german in echant seems to work well.

I can confirm this on "fresh" Natty...
Had no problems with the previous versions thought,

I am experiencing this bug in Oneiric Beta. So it still doesn’t seem to be fixed.

is this still present confirm it?

After reinstalling Natty from scratch I did not get this problem any longer. After upgrading to Oneiric it appeared again. So yes, it's still and issue and I can confirm ist.

Confirmed!
No changes until now.

answer the developers at https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=666686 and subscribe to the bug
thanks

Thanks Muhammad. I provided a full description of the bug and its reproduction based on the input provided here esp. by Thomas.

The bug is also reproduceable in the newer Empathy 3.3.1-0ubuntu2~ppa11.10+1 availble in the telepathy PPA.

As discussed in gnome-bugs #666686 this is not a problem not in Empathy, but either in the spell checking library enchant or the dictionary provided with Ubuntu:

The same effect appears i.e in gedit and traces down as follows:
If you select "Deutsch" as language option (only available option in Empathy) it fails. This equals to locale "de". If you choose "Deutsch (Deutschland)" ("de-DE") spell checking works. In Empathy you have no option to choose "de-DE" as workaround.

Traces down to the following test:

~/dev$ enchant -d de-DE test.txt
~/dev$ enchant -d de test.txt
error: line 1: missing or bad word count in the dic file
Hash Manager Error : 4

New upstream bug in enchant http://bugzilla.abisource.com/show_bug.cgi?id=13252

adding the new bugstream link.thanks

Bug is still present in 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin)

enchant works well, empathy not.

~$ enchant -d de-DE /tmp/German_Test_Text.txt
~$ enchant -d de /tmp/German_Test_Text.txt
error: line 1: missing or bad word count in the dic file
Hash Manager Error : 4

Same problem here, but I can offer a workaround:

remove package hunspell-de-de
install aspell-de and myspell-de-de

Restart empathy, switch german spell check off and on again ...

I ran into this aswell on Saucy.
Some hints in the upstream bug report helped me to find a work around, though:
Use dconf-editor, go to org/gnome/empathy/conversation and replace the "de" in "spell-checker-languages" with "de_DE". Seems to do the trick.

Perhaps someone can help me.
I cannot add a language to Empathy because I do not know how.
I search the net and all I find is people who added a language and cannot activated it, but nobody actually describes how to add a language.
Some people say go to Settings/Region & Language/ and go to Empathy and add a language, yet there is no "Empathy" tab in Regions & Language.
Any help?