LibreOffice lacks support for documents' spell-checking in Ubuntu for most languages and dialects

[Jon Hanna]

Fresh install of Raring (because I'm playing with the Beta, but I've noted similar issues before with other builds), en-IE locale. Libreoffice has English dictionaries for: en-AU, en-CA, en-GB, en-US, en-ZA, and no others.

Uninstall Libreoffice and install from .deb files. Libreoffice has support for: en-AU, en-BZ, en-CA, en-GB, en-GH, en-IE, en-IN, en-JM, en-MW, en-NA, en-NZ, en-PH, en-TT, en-US, en-ZA & en-ZW.

This severely hampers the usefulness of LibreOffice to many English speakers, unless they've installed manually.

A workaround can be to mark your document as being in the supported dialect closest to your own and then spell-check it before changing it back. This is imperfect in checking for some dialects, and not as easily done if you are mixing languages (or worse, dialects of English) in the same document.

[Jon Hanna (jonhanna)]

I'd guess other languages are equally affected, but this is the one that I noticed since I speak English.

[Jon Hanna (jonhanna)]

Oh, I meant to add, I'd gone to Ubuntu Language Settings, and that didn't help. I note that the forms of English supported almost corresponds by those supported in that settings app, though it does include en-NZ which is one of those that Libreoffice supports through download, but not through ppa.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Jon Hanna (jonhanna)]

I looked at this again, since I'd been installing libreoffice from their website while bug 739184 had yet to be fixed.

Copying over the dict-* directories from C:\Program Files (x86)\LibreOffice 4\share\extensions of a Windows partition to /usr/lib/libreoffice/share/extensions and restarting LibreOffice completely fixes this.

It would seem that these dictionaries are left out of the Ubuntu package deliberately, perhaps under the belief that aspell or myspell procides sufficient support, which it might do for some dialects (maybe it's even better, but I haven't left my installation in a useless state long enough to do comparisons), but neither supports the range of LibreOffice's own dictionaries (though maybe there's in fact an overlap, I don't know).

If it is indeed deliberate, all that's needed to fix this is to stop doing it!

[Jon Hanna (jonhanna)]

I've found after two installs on other machines (one Ubuntu, one Mint), that I had to do a full reinstall of LibreOffice before I could get the workaround above to correctly get the dictionaries to work. I'm pretty sure that wasn't the case above, so some people may not find that necessary, but having the dict-* files in place before doing a reinstall definitely means one can have working dictionaries.

[Marcus Tomlinson (marcustomlinson)]

This release of Ubuntu is no longer receiving maintenance updates. If this is still an issue on a maintained version of Ubuntu please let us know.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for libreoffice (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]