I write science fiction, and I use Open Office to do my writing, since I don’t have the money to shell out for Microsoft Office and can’t find any compelling reason to do so if I did have the money. Overall, I believe that Open Office is just as good as MS Word. However, as with any piece of software, sometimes it isn’t immediately obvious how to do something.
A lot of terms that are used in science and in science fiction are from Latin, and I got tired of having to check each one and add an exception to my spell checker for it. So, I went looking for a way to teach Latin to Open Office.
I found the answer in a posting here:
http://user.services.openoffice.org/en/forum/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=5814
To summarize, you grab a Latin dictionary file here: http://www.drouizig.org/oo/la_VA.zip
and put it into:
If you use Windows:
C:\\Program Files\\{Your Open Office Directory}\\share\\dict\\ooo\\
If you use Linux:
[HOME]/.openoffice.org2.0/user/wordbook
Then, you can set the language of a selection of paragraph, or even the whole document, by selecting:
Tools->Language->For Selection …
Tools->Language->For Paragraph …
Tools->Language->For all text …
It worked like a charm for me.
Hi there,
Thanks. Very helpful. I guess spell checking in Latin a bit of a minority concern, but I have a lot of technical vocab and it really helps to have this utility up and running.
Thanks. I’m a theological post graduate student and so my papers are always stuffed to the gills with Latin, German, Greek, Hebrew, French and on and on. It takes an annoying amount of time to individually exclude every single non-English word from the spell check protocol. This helps with the Latin.