Is downloading dictionaries now mandatory?

[Mrnofish]

I was experiencing terrible auto-correct performance with a freshly installed HeliBoard, but then I downloaded the AOSP dictionary from Codeberg and now it seems like it's gone back to acceptable (more testing is required).

That is despite the keyboard claiming it had an internal dictionary for that language.

I seem to recall at some point dictionaries were split off to reduce the size of the download, however I thought languages that were considered in one way or another major (e.g. all Western European languages) were still safe and that it was mainly the more exotic (pardon the expression) that had been left out.

If the download is indeed considered required, that should be at least an on-boarding procedure to make sure users are aware of that and don't flee in horror, right?

But I didn't see any, and I just installed HeliBoard alongside one old debug version of the fork.

Tagging @Helium314 just to make sure he takes a look. Kudos for the great work on this fork, BTW, it's downright impressive.

[iamgitcat]

You will notice big difference after installing experimental dictionaries. They will provide next word suggestions as well.

[Mrnofish]

TBH what I'm missing now from GBoard is previous word correction, i.e. the first guess is wrong however, after seeing what the following words are, it makes changes retrospectively, choosing the correct word.

Do experimental dictionaries add this capability ?

[Helium314]

The only thing that has changed in the past 9 months is that some dictionaries have been renamed, see https://github.com/Helium314/HeliBoard/tree/main/app/src/main/assets/dicts and the history.
The dictionaries still all contain the same words.

[Mrnofish]

I'm not sure what was the last time I gave the fork a fair shake, perhaps it was more than 9 months ago. I do use multi lingual mode a lot and when I tried, it was not working well enough, having no time to fiddle around I went straight back to Gboard.

However performance was doubtlessly terrible this time, until I installed the downloaded dictionary.

The keyboard was unable to correctly suggest 10-char words of common use which should be an ideal scenario.

Also it kept substituting short words with english acronyms that I never use (it's still doing this now albeit very infrequently). I thought multi mode with english was to blame, so I forced one language only in the preferences, and it did not fix the issue.

What can cause these behaviors I was experiencing?

[Helium314]

The dictionaries and most of the way of finding suggestions is nearly untouched from OpenBoard (which barely changed default AOSP keyboard behavior).
There were only some minor tweaks affecting whether a suggestions is used for auto-correct and the order of the first 3 suggestions.
A (non-experimental) dictionary from the dictionaries repository is exactly the same as the internal ones, and should have the same suggestions.

Though there was a case where for some reason suggestions were absolutely useless, and I don't know what caused it, #90.

[Mrnofish]

I see, thank you for taking the time.

From what you're saying I'm almost getting the impression the internal dictionary wasn't working or perhaps the wrong one was being used in place of the one I've selected, maybe manually installing the downloaded dictionary jogged things into working as expected again.

If I can find some spare time, I'll try installing the keyboard again in the Work Profile and see if I can reproduce the issue.

Would I be able to find something useful in the logcat, assuming the problem can be triggered again ?

[Helium314]

Would I be able to find something useful in the logcat, assuming the problem can be triggered again ?

I don't think so. You provided very little description of the issue, but I would assume it's related to the selection of suggestions by the keyboard, which happens in the native library that has been unchanged from OpenBoard.