Open Office Spelling Bee
So another problem I am having with my new operating system is with the admin/ office side. In other words…Open Office org sucks so far! Every time I am typing a document, my curser skips a line and goes to wherever it wants to…very very annoying. Plus, my spell check doesn’t work. Trust me, I am not a speller…I neeeeeeeeed this tool! Turned off the tapping feature of my touch tab, as blogged about earlier, and did the following in an effort to fix the spellcheck.
* I checked (and reinstalled) the language-support-en package (english language support), the myspell and aspell packages (two different spelling engines because Jon wasn’t sure which one Open office org wanted, and I sure as hell didn’t know!) and the english dictionaries for both myspell and aspell. I did this using the Synaptic Package Manager under the Administration menu, which I found thanks to Jon’s guidance.
* I then went into Open Office Writer and selected the Tools - Options -> Language section. The Default Language was already set to English (US) and spell check started to work. What the hell?
I asked Jon about this and he said, and I quote… “I think, the problem was that although Synaptic showed the language packs as being installed, OOo wasn’t seeing them. Reinstalling them via Symaptics seems to have enabled OOo to see them.” Translation… ‘who cares…it works doesn’t it?’
* I switched the default language to English (UK) since that’s the spelling we use here in Canada and now there are little red squiggly lines all over the screen. Like I said… I neeeed spellcheck!
July 15th, 2006 at 3:30 pm
Is interesting, usually OpenOffice.org is set default to english and has the spelling feature activated. However I am talking about the OpenOffice.org installation from the website, so I am not sure if Ubuntu takes out this setup and requires the aspell seperately.
It seems that what happened is that when you went to Tools > Options > Language, and click accept it rewrote the configuration file. This make OOo be aware of the spelling book location and activated.
A side note is that we call it OpenOffice.org rather than OpenOffice or Open Office.
July 15th, 2006 at 4:00 pm
Jza is right, OpenOffice is trademarked by a different open-source group than OpenOffice.org. The folks who make the Bluefish html editor, I think.
But then again, we’re supposed to call it GNU/Linux and nobody does that. Except RMS himself.
July 16th, 2006 at 8:31 pm
That’s wierd. Although I am not a ubuntu user, I have never seen this problem with OpenOffice.org. For me it has always just worked…and I use gentoo which is usually much more fussy about stuff like this.
July 20th, 2006 at 9:38 am
According to the OpenOffice.org web site, there is a Canadian English dictionary for spelling. Just click File>Wizards>Install new dictionaries, and a helper application will come right up. (You want to be online when you do this.)
July 24th, 2006 at 11:48 am
Sorry about the goof up…OOO it is! I have been rather out of it lately, but suffice it to say, I am through with Ubuntu, I am moving on to Suse….