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Chethan S.
Asked: 2011-05-15 17:37:00 +0800 CST

How do I add English-UK thesaurus and other locales to LibreOffice?

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I have been trying to use English-UK thesaurus in LibreOffice but so far cannot get it to work. I have installed mythes-en-us as only it was available in repos. As suggested in some forums I searched for openoffice.org thesaurus, but again US version was available. As a result I can't enable thesaurus when I choose English UK:

LibreOffice Prefs 1

LibreOffice Prefs 2

As instructed elsewhere I tried this:

cd /usr/share/myspell/dicts
sudo ln -s th_en_US_v2.dat th_en_GB_v2.dat
sudo ln -s th_en_US_v2.idx th_en_GB_v2.idx

Still the result is same as shown in above screenshots.

What can be done now?

libreoffice

5 Answers

  1. Here's what worked for me. I found most of these steps in this blog post, credit to the author for figuring this out.

    1. Download the spelling/hyphen/thesaurus dictionaries you want from LibreOffice's extensions download page.
    2. Install them in LibreOffice Tools -> Extension Manager -> Add and then close LibreOffice.
    3. sudo apt-get install libmythes-1.2-0 hunspell
    4. sudo apt-get install mythes-en-us hunspell-en-us
    5. cd /usr/share/mythes/
    6. sudo ln -s th_en_US_v2.idx th_en_GB_v2.idx
    7. sudo ln -s th_en_US_v2.dat th_en_GB_v2.dat
    8. Open LibreOffice Writer and go to Tools -> Options -> Language Settings -> Writing Aids.
    9. Verify the new thesaurus is selected, then from Writer test it by pressing Ctrl + F7 to bring up the thesaurus dialogue.

    Language settings with new thesaurus

    Functioning UK thesaurus dialogue

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  2. This latest version of the Libreoffice Extension "English Dictionaries" works with the latest version of Libreoffice and will hopefully get the thesaurus activated for you.

    http://extensions.libreoffice.org/extension-center/english-dictionaries

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  3. With each installation of Libreoffice on any of the Distros I have installed for myself or others I have found that the thesaurus always works after I have installed the English dictionaries for Apache OpenOffice-2013.07.31 rather than any extension from LibreOffice.

    This makes all the above solutions unnecessary.

    This OpenOffice dictionary extension is a year old now and although there are more recent versions here English dictionaries for Apache OpenOffice they always give the error

    Extension requires at least OpenOffice.org reference version 4.0

    when I attempt to install them.

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    • For English-UK, the correct answer is in Mik's

    I am posting this answer for other locales:

    So:

    • For French, go here to get the French dictionary and install in LibreOffice Writer in Tools-Extensions manager. (The spelling works before installing that, but synonyms context menu does not).
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  5. JosephWheatley's answer led me into the right direction: spelling packages are maintained by different people and so the names are pretty different. While en-us packages exist in many variations, this is not for en-gb, so you don't find the right packages by accident. So I searched aptitude for *-en-gb in every category (dictionary, thesaurus, hyphenation) and after installation libreoffice showed en-gb as spellcheck opportunity! :)

    sudo aptitude install myspell-en-gb libreoffice-grammarcheck-en-gb mythes-en-gb

    works for me on Debian Jessie (because it is Testing it is similar to Ubuntu). The last 2 packages are metapackages (and thus are not! autocompleted nor shown as installed when filtering by ~i for me) and they are linking to

    • libreoffice-lightproof-en
    • mythes-en-us
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