Wednesday 19 December 2012

Enable spell check for British English in LibreOffice

 I wanted spell-check to work with "British English" in LibreOffice Office suite as I am more comfortable with it than American English. I was annoyed that LibreOffice Writer was saying that "colour" is of wrong spelling. I started out fixing the issue. The procedure described below would be similar for other languages like German, Italian, Spanish etc.
en-us Spell Check LibreOffice
Install myspell-british
 After a brief search on the internet I found that the spell-check in LibreOffice works only if the relevant myspell packages are installed. I found that "myspell" for British English was not installed by default on my GNOME 3.4.2 / openSUSE 12.2. We can either use zypper or YaST to install the "myspell-british". Firstly we ensure that the relevant community repositories are configured in YaST.
YaST based installation for myspell-british
 In GNOME 3.X desktop we can open Activities by pressing left "win" key or Alt+F1. Then we can type "install" and locate the YaST installer. After opening YaST we can type in the package name in "Find" box and then choose the relevant packages and click on the apply button. The following is a screenshot of YaST showing "myspell-british" installed.
myspell YaST
zypper based installation for myspell-british
 First we open quick command launcher (Alt+F2) and open terminal using command "gnome-terminal". In terminal we use the below command to install the relevant packages.
$sudo zypper in myspell-american
Configure Language in LibreOffice
 After installing "myspell" we need to navigate to Tools==>Options as shown below.
LibreOffice Options
  In the new "Options" window  we can choose "Language Settings" and then "Languages" and in this menu we can choose default spell-check language as shown below. You should see a tick mark against the languages for which "myspell" packages are installed. You can perform "spell-check" only for the languages which have a tick mark against them. After pressing "OK" button we need to close and re-open  LibreOffice for the settings to take effect.
LibreOffice Options Language Settings
Finally i can see that spell-check works for British English or "en-gb".
en-gb Spell Check LibreOffice

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