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Voikko spell checker service for Android

This is the developer wiki for things related to using Voikko on Android. Voikko for Android is mainly developed by Harri Pitkänen (hatapitk@iki.fi). Please contact him or the mailing lists for Voikko project if you have further questions.

Please note that Voikko for Android is not yet ready for general use! Once it is ready, it can be installed from Google Play just as you would install any other Android application.

Below you may find links to apk application packages that are made available for testing. To install these you need

1. a phone or tablet that has been configured to allow application installations from untrusted sources. Many (but not all) devices can be configured to allow this.
2. Android version 4.0 or later on that device. Some vendors of Android devices (at least Samsung) may have removed the spell checker framework from their devices. Such devices cannot take advantage of Droidvoikko at the moment.

You should fully understand what you are doing if you try to install these pre-release applications.

In this initial pre-release version dictionaries are loaded from external storage and not yet embedded into the application. You should install a suitable dictionary before continuing with the installation:

1. Create a top level folder Voikko under your SD card (or other external storage that is used by your Android device).
2. Install a dictionary by unpacking any of the zipped Voikko dictionaries for Finnish under the newly created directory.

• If in doubt, use "dict.zip" which contains the standard spelling dictionary.
• Please ensure that you maintain the directory structure within the zip file. After unpacking you SD card should contain directory structure Voikko/2/mor-something/voikko-fi_FI.*
• Make sure your SD card is in place and available for Android applications to use before trying to use spell checking. You must not have your phone/tablet connected to a PC in mass storage mode while testing the spell checker (using USB in Android debug bridge mode is permitted).

1. Install the Android application from the www server for test packages.
2. Go to Settings -> Language & input -> Spelling Correction to activate the newly installed speller component. If you device locale is something else than Finnish you also need to tap the globe icon at the end of the Voikko entry and select Finnish as the spell checking language.

Know issues in the latest packages (will be fixed for final release)

• Dictionary needs to be installed on external storage because libvoikko currently requires file system access for reading dictionary data. Libvoikko will be improved to support other storage methods and once we have support for reading dictionaries using AssetManager they will be included directly within the application package.
• Application identifier org.puimula.droidvoikko will be changed to include language code: org.puimula.droidvoikko.fi. This will allow spell checkers for multiple languages to be installed simultaneously.
• Android versions 4.0.3 and 4.1 contain additional improvements for spell checker framework that allow better performance and quality of spell checking. These features should be used when available.
• Since dictionaries may use a lot of memory the application should release the memory if spell checking functionality has not been needed for a while and memory is needed for other use.
• Locking needs to be added around some of the native methods.