Today, one of our customers at TBits.net noticed that when composing an e-mail in Roundcube, there is a spell checker button at the top. But only for English, and when there was text in the e-mail, and he clicked on the spell check button, he got the message: “An error was encountered on the server. Please try again later.”

I found the cause in the Roundcube log file, in /var/log/roundcubemail/errors:

PHP Error: Spell check engine error: Pspell extension not available in /usr/share/roundcubemail/program/steps/utils/spell.inc on line 50

So I installed the required packages:

yum install php-pspell aspell-de
systemctl restart httpd

Now this works for English. It seems for German and other languages, there are no packages readily available in the repositories.
I checked https://apps.fedoraproject.org/packages/aspell-de, there are packages for Fedora, but not for EPEL.

So you go to https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/aspell/dict/0index.html#0.60 and download the dictionary for your language, and install it like this on your Kolab server:

tar xjf aspell6-de-20030222-1.tar.bz2
cd aspell6-de-20030222-1
./configure
make
make install

Now do a reload in Roundcube, and now you can check your spelling even in German!

 

Update: It was suggested by Luca Berra from Italy, to use enchant and hunspell instead of pspell/aspell.

For a discussion of hunspell vs aspell, see http://penguindreams.org/blog/aspell-and-hunspell-a-tale-of-two-spell-checkers/

Luca gave me these instructions:

yum install php-enchant hunspell-it
 
vi /etc/roundcubemail/config.inc.php
    $config['spellcheck_engine'] = 'enchant';

I have not tested this. Thanks to Luca for this suggestion!

Install spell checking for Roundcube on CentOS7
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