Hi There,
I’m using LibreOffice 7.4.7.2. Its a brand new install on a very recent install of Debian.
Everything installed with no problems at all with ‘apt’ using a standard repository.
I notice that automatic capitalisation is working but nothing is getting underlined when I make a spelling mistake. I have done some Google Searching but most if not all the results came up with solutions that must be for old versions as the menus and options have changed.
I found my ~/.config/libreoffice folder and renamed it then restarted Writer, which recreated the folder as expected but that didn’t solve my problem.
I have dug through the options and things seem to be set fairly well for a guy living in Australia and typing in English. The Status Bar at the bottom of the screen shows “English (Australia)”
In Options I have three User Defined Dictionaries selected. (Default settings)
technical [All]
List of Ignored Words [All]
standard [All]
As I said everything looks good but nothing is being picked out as misspelt
Any Ideas what is going wrong?
Thanks
David
Default installation comes with only the en_US dictionary.
Does spell checking work if you change your text language to en_US? If so, this means that Writer does not fall back to “Globish” when an en variant is missing.
In Fedora, English variants are contained in a specific package, libreoffice-languagepack-en, which must be explicitly installed. The name may vary in Debian.
That’s interesting. I thought I’d get some kind of error if I selected a dictionary that does not exist.
I changed the language to English(USA) and the spell checker works. So you are right, likely English Australia is missing.
Also Interestingly the tick box for Language would only stay set on “For Selection” the others just uncheck silently.
I went off to figure out how to install additional dictionaries.
Google’s AI overview suggested I use freedict.
This apt command lists all of the available freedict dictionaries.
apt search dict-freedict
The list this command outputs is huge right down to Swahili-English but no Australian!
Then by luck, back in Writer I went into Tools → Language → More Dictionaries Online.
Top of the list is “English Dictionary” and the website link show it includes the following variants.
- en_AU (Australian) (updated: 2024-02-01)
- en_CA (Canadian) (updated: 2024-02-01)
- en_GB (British) (updated: 2025-01-01)
- en_US (American) (updated: 2024-02-01)
- en_ZA (South African) (updated: 2025-01-01)
I installed those and reset the dictionary to English (Australia) and restarted LibreOffice Writer (just for fun).
And now it works. It even gets things like Organisation / Organization right.
Not how I was expecting to solve this but any fix is a good one.
Thanks for commenting and setting me on the right track.
Hope this explanation helps someone else.
David
PS I can see the other install languages in the following location.
Tools → Language → for Selection → More… → Language Drop Down
The installed languages have a green tick next to them.