HOWTO: get spellchecking working in Ximian Openoffice

[asiobob]

Ages ago I installed ximian openoffice-bin and noticed it didn't spell check at all. After some searching a forum member pointed to a script which after I ran partially fixed the problem (I could spell check using certain fonts).

More recently I emerged the latest ~ ximian-openoffice from source, and noticed the same problem, the previous fix did not work.

Here;s how I did get it to work.

1. Visit, http://lingucomponent.openoffice.org/dictpack.html
2. Download DicOOo macro.sxw (yes an fear macro)
3. Run this as a USER probably for every user.
4. Openoffice may warn macros are dangerous
5. Follow the instructions in the document, ie, a button appears in the document, click it, it installs dictionarys from the net of your choosing but more importantly does something to get the spell checking working (eg I had the dictionaries before but they never worked)

6. close all openoffice programs.
7 restart, Tools, options. Lanuage aids, make sure your dictionaries are selected (if they are not).
8. spell checking will work (hopefully)

note: previously, it just said every thing was correct when there were clearly incorrect words

[Pink]

Or simply adjust two lines in the install-dict file in /opt/Ximian-OpenOffice so they are as follows:

[DiskDoc]

Is ASIO_BOBs method still the way to go? I've installed openoffice-ximian-1.3.9 from source for a non-geek friend, partly to get a swedish interface and because I thought it'd be better than the standard OOo ebuild.

But dictionaries..dear, dear.. Maybe I'm wrong in wanting it simpler since this IS Gentoo after all. Other distros probably have dictionaries all wrapped up and ready to go.

OOodi didn't work for me here. It used to work with the standard OOo but as I recall it stopped doing that for some unknown reason.

[later]

Ok.. Seems by running this macro-script (newer than the one I found included with XOOo):

http://lingucomponent.openoffice.org/dictpack.html

..I was able to install some dictionaries for a specific user at least. It's probably possible to do that for the entire system as well by running the macro as root or by copying in the dictionaries to /opt/Ximian-OpenOffice/share/dict/ooo by hand and modifying dictionary.lst.

On OOodi, I think my troubles might be due to its ebuild not depending on Gnome. Running it on the KDE-centered system I mentioned produced a lot of complaints about missing libgnome.so. It worked better on a Gnome-based system.
_________________
"So slay me now! I have little magic left."
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[Jim6]

You legend! That's been annoying me for a while; and the minute I go to look for a solution this was here! Thanks!

- Didn't need the fix in the second post
- Using Ximian-Openoffice 1.1.1