en-gb thesaurus is missing

[RichardNeill]

Problem: The EN-GB thesaurus is missing for LibreOffice.

To observe:
1. Fresh install of 21.04, set Location to United Kingdom.
2. Start LibreOffice Writer, choose the Tools menu.
3. The "Thesaurus" item is greyed out.

Root cause: there is no mythes-en-gb package available (but there is mythes-en-us).

Workaround:
Give British English speakers the American English thesaurus i.e.
symlink the US thesaurus by the GB one.
cd /usr/share/mythes; ln -s th_en_US_v2.dat th_en_GB_v2.dat; ln -s th_en_US_v2.idx th_en_GB_v2.idx;

Note: this report and tested workaround is on a fresh install of 21.04, although this problem has been extant for years. There appears to be no GB version of the thesaurus. However, as UK-english and USA-english language is so similar, it would be OK to provide the thesaurus from the US package in the meantime as a symlink.

For others who find this bug report while searching the same issue, note that
en-us is "english united-states"
en-gb is "english great-britain",
-uk is "ukraine".
(Don't look for "english united-kingdom", en-uk, which doesn't exist).

[Ubuntu Foundations Team Bug Bot (crichton)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. It seems that your bug report is not filed about a specific source package though, rather it is just filed against Ubuntu in general. It is important that bug reports be filed about source packages so that people interested in the package can find the bugs about it. You can find some hints about determining what package your bug might be about at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bugs/FindRightPackage. You might also ask for help in the #ubuntu-bugs irc channel on Freenode.

To change the source package that this bug is filed about visit https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/1923040/+editstatus and add the package name in the text box next to the word Package.

[This is an automated message. I apologize if it reached you inappropriately; please just reply to this message indicating so.]

[Mattia Rizzolo (mapreri)]

Thinking about this, I declie your proposal to symlink the en-us thesaurus dictionary into en-gb.

en-gb and en-us are sufficiently different than I don't think we should do it.

[RichardNeill (ubuntu-richardneill)]

Thanks for your response. I looked a bit more into it, and it seems that the official recommended way of dealing with this problem is the symlink approach, and that en-GB is explicitly provided by the en-US package - the compiler of the thesaurus intentionally combined both languages' spelling variants as synonyms within the same thesaurus.

http://astarix.co.uk/2012/06/proper-british-language-tools-libreoffice/
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=749204
https://askubuntu.com/questions/42850/how-do-i-add-english-uk-thesaurus-and-other-locales-to-libreoffice

In fact, it even gives the right British-English options. When I test it in LibreOffice, and search for the word "hue", it prompts me with both "color" (USA) and "colour" (GB). Similarly, it offers "aluminium" and "aluminum" as synonyms, and "pavement" and "sidewalk".

So, please reconsider - or at least create a metapackage "mythes-en-GB" which depends on "mythes-en" and contains the symlinks.

(After all, should a better solution arise i.e. someone compiles a dedicated en-GB thesaurus, we can always improve, but this approach gets 99.9% of the way there, vs. nothing, - and in the unlikely event that the GB-user ends up with a US-english word, such as "color", it is already caught by the GB-english spellchecker).

[Gunnar Hjalmarsson (gunnarhj)]

Hmm Mattia... This is the commit you made to fix that Debian bug 6 years ago:

https://salsa.debian.org/libreoffice-team/libreoffice/libreoffice-dictionaries/-/commit/675b6f4f

Is there a reason to reconsider?

[Mattia Rizzolo (mapreri)]

That was done 6 years ago, but reverted a few months later (6388ad7919526ff00d5a850c811114e74e74824f and the commit after that drops the Provides) and actually never released.

ISTR that there were such symlinks in the past (before lo-dicts came to be), but they haven't been in place for quite a while.

Now, the previous reject was based on me sharing a few words on IRC... but I can try to think again if it's a good idea to place such symlinks.

[Gunnar Hjalmarsson (gunnarhj)]

@Mattia: Please see this short readme file:

https://salsa.debian.org/libreoffice-team/libreoffice/libreoffice-dictionaries/-/blob/master/dictionaries/en/README_en_GB_thes.txt

My interpretation of that is that a symlink would not be a workaround, but it would be a setup in accordance with upstream's intention. That's also in line with Richard's info provided in comment #3. If I understand it correctly, they have put words and spelling variants for both American and British English in the same thesaurus.