Can't change spellchecker from en-UK to en-US

[michaelbr]

I have LO 7.0.1.1.0+, VCL:gtk3, UI:en-US on a MX Linux 19.4, my local is en-UK (the reason for using this local is I’m located in Spain, using dd/mm/yyyy as date format), in Writer, I set default language for document as en-US, when I went to Tools > Language > For All Text > More > Language Settings > Language > Default Language for Documents is en-US, but when I click Writing Aids, the Spellchecker, Hyphenator, Thesaurus all shows en-UK, even after I changed to en-US, how can I change spellchecker to en-US? I’m doing something wrong?

Changed according to instructions below, it seems to be working, this is the configuration for the language for a Spanish document

What I don’t understand is why when I click on Writing Aids > Available Language Modules > Edit it showed en-UK?

and when I clicked on Writing Aids > User-defined dictionary > Edit, it showed en-US

[anon73440385]

Dictionary standard (.dic) is your personal dictionary in your LibreOffice user profile, created when you make your first entry into a dictionary and normally has no language (i.e. created as standard [All]). So I can’t tell, whether this is specific to MX Linux nor whether you changed the language manually.

Default is:

$ cat standard.dic 
OOoUserDict1
lang: <none>
type: positive
---

Your’s seemd to be changed by manual operation (edit) to:

$ cat standard.dic
OOoUserDict1
lang: en-US
type: positive
---

What I don’t understand is why when I click on Writing Aids > Available Language Modules > Edit it showed en-UK?

Me neither - and I got no clue about the history of your LibreOffice user profile and any changes you made in the past,

[michaelbr]

@anon73440385 you’re right, I changed it to en-US.

[ajlittoz]

As @anon73440385 points out, you don’t change spellcheckers. Spellcheckers are generic engines independent from languages. They use additional tables to take into account the differing rules of the target languages. Therefore you must install these tables before being able to spellcheck a document. I gave the outline of the procedure in your other question 318600/lo-writer-for-linux-using-1-spellchecker-languages.

Configuring the spellchecker is only one face of the problem.

The other one is to tell LibreOffice which language you want to use. This is the second configuration step. If you don’t install the LO interface functions and LO dictionaries, spellchecking won’t work. If the dictionaries for en_US don’t show up in Tools>Options, Language Settings>Writing Aids, they have not been installed (which is strange to me because I thought en_US was always installed).

Install the missing bits.

How to define the document language is described in your other question (but you already know the procedure).

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[michaelbr]

@ajlittoz, is this normal? the spellchecker seems to be working, but when I go to Writing Aids, it showed en-UK for language and en-US for User-defined dictionary, maybe I messed up when trying to make it work.

[anon73440385]

Hello,

You can’t change a spellchecker (and there is no need to do so). Spell checking appears automatically, if enabled based on text language. If you mix different languages within a single document, you’ll get spell checking according to the language of the respective part of a document (provided the language support for the defined language is installed).

In that sense:

[1] - If you don’t get spell checking according to English (USA) text of a document, most likely the proper language pack and/or dictionary is not installed. If I’m remember correctly, MX Linux is a Debian based Linux system and, if so, you need to check whether package hunspell-en-US is installed (sudo apt install hunspell-en-US). For Spanish you need hunspell-es - see also apt search hunspell | grep ^hunspell.

[2] - If spell checking follows English (UK), then most likely the text being checked has that language (check with the status bar, where the language of the text under the cursor is shown). To get correct spell checking you need to change the language of the text.

Hope that helps.

[michaelbr]

[1] all 3 are installed (en-US, en-UK, es-ES).

[2] changed the setting for document language, it’s working now, but one small bit I still don’t understand, I’ve added more details in my OP.