9

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?

fossfreedom
  • 174,526
Chethan S.
  • 2,874

5 Answers5

18

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

Tom Brossman
  • 13,297
8

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

2

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.

kos
  • 41,268
1
  • 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).
0

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
PythoNic
  • 706