coliblog

OpenOffice.org 3.0 is going to be released next month and it features a grammar checker API. That is, a grammar checker can integrate itself into OpenOffice.org and check text while the user is typing text. The most recent release of LanguageTool, 0.9.3, makes use of this, thanks to the work of Marcin Miłkowski. It still has some bugs, but it is useful already:

In related news, the upcoming version of OpenOffice.org will not use the dictionary wizard (DicOOo) anymore, instead dictionaries for spell checking and thesauri will be installed as extensions. You can download those extensions from the official extension website.

My presentation "Integrated Tools for Spelling, Style, and Grammar Checking" can now be found on my publications page. It's just an overview which doesn't go much into the details, but everything is documented elsewhere: for spell checking, see the Hunspell manual, for grammar checking see the LanguageTool development page and for the thesaurus see a paper about OpenThesaurus (mhh, slightly outdated) and the OpenThesaurus installation README.

OpenOffice.org 2.3 has just been released. If you want to use this version with LanguageTool, you need to get LanguageTool 0.9.1, which has also just been released (older versions of LanguageTool won't work with OpenOffice 2.3).

Tomorrow I'll travel to the OpenOffice.org conference in Barcelona. I'll publish my slides (about grammar and spell checking and thesauri) here after the conference.

For those who didn't notice yet, the list of OpenOffice.org dictionaries (spelling, thesaurus, and hyphenation) has been moved to the Wiki at wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Dictionaries. Everybody can now update their own dictionaries. But remember that the files still need to be on the official FTP server if you want them to be installable by the Wizard inside OpenOffice.org (DicOOo), i.e. you will need to send the files to me or someone with access to the server.

The German version of OpenOffice.org 2.0.3 has just been released. OpenOffice.org now comes with my OpenThesaurus, i.e. the German thesaurus doesn't have to be installed separately anymore (and it's not only part of German version but of all releases).

OpenOffice.org 2.0.2 has been released. The following linguistic features have been improved:

• English: the thesaurus can finally be used with British English without the need to configure anything. As before, the thesaurus accepts and lists both American and British English spellings.
• German: The hyphenation patterns have been improved. Wrong hyphenations have been fixed, and many hyphenation points that had been missing are now detected. However, the algorithm still isn't perfect, it sometimes makes mistakes with compound nouns.
• German: Björn Jacke's spelling dictionaries are now part of OpenOffice.org, so there's no need to download German dictionaries anymore (except the thesaurus). The dictionaries now accept many compound words like Baustellenschild and Mehrheitsgesellschafter thanks to features in Hunspell, which has replaced MySpell as OpenOffice.org's integrated spell checker.

The version OpenThesaurus for OpenOffice.org 2.x is now also available for the Swiss spelling. This simply means that all occurences of "ß" have been replaced with "ss". You can download this version (de_CH) from the OpenThesaurus homepage or using OpenOffice.org's integrated dictionary wizard.

The export of the OpenThesaurus data into OpenOffice.org format has been improved so that more words can be found. Like on the OpenThesaurus website, information in parentheses is now ignored when searching, e.g. you can now find the entry "Velo (schweiz.)" when searching for "Velo".

As usual, you can install the new thesaurus version using File -> Wizards -> Install new dictionaries.

Hyphenation of German words in OpenOffice.org has been very buggy for a long time (although few people noticed it). Now this seems to be fixed. To try out the fixed hyphenation patterns get the latest hyph_de_DE.dic attached to issue 26355, install it over the file with the same name in "(OpenOffice_directory)/share/dict/ooo" and re-start OpenOffice.org. Thanks to Laci Nemeth for help with fixing this issue...