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I have been trying to use English-UK thesaurus in LibreOffice but so far cannot get it to work. I have installed mythes-en-us as only it was available in repos. As suggested in some forums I searched for openoffice.org thesaurus, but again US version was available. As a result I can't enable thesaurus when I choose English UK:

LibreOffice Prefs 1

LibreOffice Prefs 2

As instructed elsewhere I tried this:

cd /usr/share/myspell/dicts
sudo ln -s th_en_US_v2.dat th_en_GB_v2.dat
sudo ln -s th_en_US_v2.idx th_en_GB_v2.idx

Still the result is same as shown in above screenshots.

What can be done now?

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  • i am trying to create a more general question on the matter (askubuntu.com/q/223557/47206) but my question was closed as duplicate of this here. could you edit yours so as to make it applicable to other languages too? then i could leave mine closed and add more answers here
    – user47206
    Dec 2, 2012 at 22:45
  • @Tom Brossman, please see above comment. also, could you consider editing this one in this respect, or otherwise vote to reopen mine?
    – user47206
    Dec 2, 2012 at 22:47
  • @cipricus I only learned enough about this issue to produce the below answer. I don't know how to improve it to make it more general. I agree that a more general answer would be best, so please edit mine if you know how. I also just voted to re-open the other one (now showing 4 of five needed votes), if that is best for you. Dec 3, 2012 at 6:41

5 Answers 5

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Here's what worked for me. I found most of these steps in this blog post, credit to the author for figuring this out.

  1. Download the spelling/hyphen/thesaurus dictionaries you want from LibreOffice's extensions download page.
  2. Install them in LibreOffice Tools -> Extension Manager -> Add and then close LibreOffice.
  3. sudo apt-get install libmythes-1.2-0 hunspell
  4. sudo apt-get install mythes-en-us hunspell-en-us
  5. cd /usr/share/mythes/
  6. sudo ln -s th_en_US_v2.idx th_en_GB_v2.idx
  7. sudo ln -s th_en_US_v2.dat th_en_GB_v2.dat
  8. Open LibreOffice Writer and go to Tools -> Options -> Language Settings -> Writing Aids.
  9. Verify the new thesaurus is selected, then from Writer test it by pressing Ctrl + F7 to bring up the thesaurus dialogue.

Language settings with new thesaurus

Functioning UK thesaurus dialogue

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  • this should be set as definitive answer
    – user47206
    Nov 30, 2012 at 20:26
  • For Australian English, use sudo ln -s th_en_US_v2.idx th_en_AU_v2.idx and sudo ln -s th_en_US_v2.dat th_en_AU_v2.dat.
    – Sparhawk
    Nov 9, 2013 at 4:12
8

This latest version of the Libreoffice Extension "English Dictionaries" works with the latest version of Libreoffice and will hopefully get the thesaurus activated for you.

http://extensions.libreoffice.org/extension-center/english-dictionaries

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With each installation of Libreoffice on any of the Distros I have installed for myself or others I have found that the thesaurus always works after I have installed the English dictionaries for Apache OpenOffice-2013.07.31 rather than any extension from LibreOffice.

This makes all the above solutions unnecessary.

This OpenOffice dictionary extension is a year old now and although there are more recent versions here English dictionaries for Apache OpenOffice they always give the error

Extension requires at least OpenOffice.org reference version 4.0

when I attempt to install them.

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1
  • For English-UK, the correct answer is in Mik's

I am posting this answer for other locales:

So:

  • For French, go here to get the French dictionary and install in LibreOffice Writer in Tools-Extensions manager. (The spelling works before installing that, but synonyms context menu does not).
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JosephWheatley's answer led me into the right direction: spelling packages are maintained by different people and so the names are pretty different. While en-us packages exist in many variations, this is not for en-gb, so you don't find the right packages by accident. So I searched aptitude for *-en-gb in every category (dictionary, thesaurus, hyphenation) and after installation libreoffice showed en-gb as spellcheck opportunity! :)

sudo aptitude install myspell-en-gb libreoffice-grammarcheck-en-gb mythes-en-gb

works for me on Debian Jessie (because it is Testing it is similar to Ubuntu). The last 2 packages are metapackages (and thus are not! autocompleted nor shown as installed when filtering by ~i for me) and they are linking to

  • libreoffice-lightproof-en
  • mythes-en-us

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