No spell check in openoffice?

[Mantazz]

I built openoffice.org 3.0.0 on my FBSD 7.2-release (laptop) system from ports. However I don't seem to have spell check working in openoffice. I can type any arbitrary garbage I want and it is not found as misspelled while typing or when running spell check from tools.
The auto-correct does work, though (which I presume is a separate function).

[drhowarddrfine]

I can't check right now but you should have a button at the top with "abc" and a red wavy line under it? That should be toggled on for spellcheck.

[Mantazz]

The button you refer to is toggled on, but no spell checking is occurring. Even when I enter nonsense or intentionally misspelled words it does nothing. It only catches the common typing errors like "teh" instead of "the".

Is openoffice spell checker dependent on a working java installation? I don't currently have a jre or jdk installed on here.

[jggimi]

In OO3, dictionaries are packaged separately. For FreeBSD, that should be the chain of ports/editors/ooodict* ports, including oodict-all.

[DrJ]

Are you sure they are packaged separately? They are not in my (pretty recent) ports tree, nor are they listed on the FreeBSD site.

The Dictionary does not work for me either. There was a bug early in the OO.o 3 cycle, but I *think* I saw that this was fixed. This still doesn't work for me, and it is a major irritation.

[jggimi]

After further research in FreeBSD's source repository, it looks like the editors/oodict* ports were pulled from the tree several years ago. I'm not a fbsd user; I got my information from external sources, such as:

http://porting.openoffice.org/freebsd/dictionary.html

[Mantazz]

So I looked around a bit more today. I found that you can download the dictionaries from Sun, in particular you can find the US English dictionary at :http://extensions.services.openoffic...ect/en_US-dict
And there are a few ways that one can install it. However, if you installed openoffice 3 on FreeBSD you will likely get an error trying to install it, something like

bad transfer url

A little more searching on that leads to a discussion hosted at freebsd.org:http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=127946
Which in my case seems to be bad news. I, like many others, installed openoffice using a package from good-day.net. And of course we don't ordinarily make a habit of compiling packages (that would make them ports, wouldn't it?). However someone did find where the bug is that makes it impossible to install dictionaries in openoffice3 in FreeBSD 7 or above; and they released a patch for it.

[Mantazz]

Last night I began building openoffice-3 from ports/editors. I did a full cvsup before I began to (hopefully) get the latest of everything. The discussion I pointed to at freebsd.org earlier suggests that the patch may be integrated into the build now, so I have begun make.

At this point make has been running for about 14-18 hours. I saw mention of it needing around 11gb, right now the work directory is at about 7gb currently This is on a P4m 1.6ghz with 2gb ram.

After I complete make, I would like to roll this into a package for my own use (particularly if I need to reinstall it later), what is the command to do that?

[teckk]

This is slightly dated but still works. Use your own parameters.

Something like

pkg_info | grep openoffice

Which returns something like

en-openoffice.org-US-3.0.0 Integrated wordprocessor/dbase/spreadsheet/drawing/chart/br

Then

pkg_create -b en-openoffice.org-US-3.0.0

After it's done you should have a file in current directory

en-openoffice.org-US-3.0.0.tbz

Install it with

pkg_add en-openoffice.org-US-3.0.0.tbz

Make sure, of course, to specify the full path to the file, if you do not execute the "pkg_add" command from the same directory where the file is located. Also note that dependencies of the package will not be automatically downloaded, since we're installing the package from a local file. Any dependencies that cause the install to fail will need to be installed from Ports or Packages before the package we created will successfully install on another system.

As of FreeBSD 6.0-RELEASE, it is also possible to create packages of the installed application's dependencies at the same time you create a package of the installed application. This might make installing the package on another system easier.

pkg_create -Rb en-openoffice.org-US-3.0.0

After a few minutes, you should have packages of OpenOffice.org and a bunch of its dependencies in the current directory. Doing an "ls" will reveal a list, along the order of this:

ORBit2-2.12.4_1.tgz                     jpeg-6b_3.tgz
atk-1.10.3.tgz                          libIDL-0.8.6_1.tgz
bitstream-vera-1.10_2.tgz               libXft-2.1.7.tgz
cairo-1.0.2_1.tgz                       libbonobo-2.10.1_2.tgz
cdparanoia-3.9.8_7.tgz                  libiconv-1.9.2_1.tgz
en-US-openoffice.org-2.0.0.tgz          libxml2-2.6.22.tgz
expat-1.95.8_3.tgz                      linc-1.0.3_4.tgz
fam-2.6.9_6.tgz                         openldap-client-2.2.29.tgz
fontconfig-2.3.2,1.tgz                  pango-1.10.1.tgz
freetype2-2.1.10_1.tgz                  perl-5.8.7.tgz
gconf2-2.12.1.tgz                       pkgconfig-0.20.tgz
gettext-0.14.5.tgz                      png-1.2.8_2.tgz
glib-2.8.4.tgz                          popt-1.7.tgz
gnomehier-2.0_7.tgz                     samba-libsmbclient-3.0.20b_2.tgz
gnomemimedata-2.4.2.tgz                 shared-mime-info-0.16_2.tgz
gnomevfs2-2.12.2.tgz                    tiff-3.7.4.tgz
gtk-2.8.8.tgz                           xorg-fonts-encodings-6.8.2.tgz
hicolor-icon-theme-0.5.tgz              xorg-fonts-truetype-6.8.2.tgz
howl-1.0.0.tgz                          xorg-libraries-6.8.2.tgz

That's a lot of packages! Place these in the same directory on the target system, and "pkg_add en-openoffice.org-US-3.0.0.tgz" as you did with the previously created package. This time, all of the application's dependencies are present locally, so they should be added as well.

One incredibly important note about packages. If you create a package in FreeBSD 5.x and attempt to install it on a FreeBSD 6.x system, you'll probably be okay so long as the 6.x system has compat5x enabled. However, you CANNOT install a package created in 6.x on a 5.x system. There is no "compability mode" allowing the older system to run packages created on the newer one. Installing a 6.x package on 5.x will not work, and will give you nothing but headaches.

Edit:
Because of changes in xorg and directory structure you may not be able to move a package from one version to a newer one. Better off to update your ports tree, resolve all dependencies, build the app, have it working well, then make a package of it that you can use for another machine running the same version no of BSD.

[Mantazz]

The make process took about 36 hours, though make install was done in about 10 or 15 minutes. Once I started openoffice I found that it still had no dictionary installed by default (and hence spell checking wasn't doing anything out-of-the-box).
I just downloaded the dictionary, and installed it as an extension, then restarted open office, and life is good again.
Note that openoffice had to be restarted after installing the dictionary in order for spell check to work (it did not tell me it would need me to do that).

[DrJ]

Adding the extension in 3.1.0 does not work. It gives the usual "bad transfer url" error message.

[Mantazz]

I did not run into the bad transfer url error that I saw in 3.0.0. Did you build 3.1.0 from ports? What version of FreeBSD are you running?

On my system, running FBSD 7.2-release, I built 3.1.0_2 from ports, and I was able to add the dictionary as an extension without running into the bad transfer url error. It now checks spelling on-the-fly as expected and has a useful dictionary. In my case this is all done on i386 architecture.

If you could share a little more information on your setup we may be able to figure out why you cannot install the dictionary. Alternately if you are running 7.2-release on i386, I could send you my openoffice build (as a package) - it is around 130MB.

[DrJ]

Originally Posted by Mantazz

Did you build 3.1.0 from ports? What version of FreeBSD are you running?

Yes, built from ports. Actually it was portupgraded from 3.0, which was also installed from ports. 7-STABLE i386 (about a month old).

I don't have time at the moment to diddle with it. I'll portupgrade again in a couple of weeks.

[Mantazz]

I've never used the portupgrade utility before, I would recommend cvsup'ing your ports tree, uninstalling your existing openoffice, and then building from the newest port. It worked for me without any further manipulation beyond the installation of the dictionary.

Though why the dictionary isn't rolled in is a question I cannot answer.