Dictionary installation for non-mainstream languages on Mac

l10n
#1

Hi all,

I have a question with regard to installing dictionaries :

On Mac, when I download from the libreoffice.org site, I can only use
the en_US DMG image, and then, by some script magic, my platform is
detected as using the French locale and thus the French lang/help pack
is suggested along with the installation DMG. So far so good.

Suppose now that I have installed LibO, I have my French interface and
help, and that I now want a Chinese spellcheck - how would I do that ?
Where is the spellcheck dictionary ? These questions are being asked on
the users list and the download site doesn't appear to offer any help in
this regard. I'm a bit confused, are all the dictionaries included in
the main installer ? If not, where are the language specific dictionaries ?

Remember : we are talking about the Mac platform. If I activate the Mac
OS system Chinese language setting, my whole system will be in Chinese
which is not what I want.

Alex

#2

Hi Alexander, *,

Suppose now that I have installed LibO, I have my French interface and
help, and that I now want a Chinese spellcheck

There is no such thing as a chinese spell checker - the characters are
words already, so you'd need some kind of grammar-checking instead
(that can detect what characters/glyph belong to one "expression").

- how would I do that ?

For Chinese: you can't.

Where is the spellcheck dictionary ?

A spellchecking dictionary for Chinese (or Japanese) doesn't make sense.

Remember : we are talking about the Mac platform. If I activate the Mac
OS system Chinese language setting, my whole system will be in Chinese

LO/OOo on the Mac is able to use both the system's spellcheck
functionality, as well as hunspell - but then again, this only helps
when there are dictionaries available.

Dictionaries can be installed as extensions, just like with OOo - and
you'll find many dictionaries that are not included in the installer
at the extensions website.

ciao
Christian

#3

Hi Christian,

There is no such thing as a chinese spell checker - the characters are
words already, so you'd need some kind of grammar-checking instead
(that can detect what characters/glyph belong to one "expression").

Thanks for clearing this up, but Chinese dictionaries do exist
nonetheless, that work by typing in radicals of the characters that you
want to produce, so I am assuming that none exist that can be
distributed directly with LibO at the time being.

Alex

#4

Hi Alexander, *,

There is no such thing as a chinese spell checker - the characters are
words already, so you'd need some kind of grammar-checking instead
(that can detect what characters/glyph belong to one "expression").

Thanks for clearing this up, but Chinese dictionaries do exist
nonetheless, that work by typing in radicals of the characters that you
want to produce,

That is not a spellcheck dictionary, but an input method editor, thats
two completely different things.
And neither OOo nor LO did ever ship their own. But they work with the
system's IMEs. I use scim with anthy on linux/gnome and it works fine,
and also have no problems using kotoeri on Mac (that is for japanese,
but the same does work with the corresponding chinese IMEs)

so I am assuming that none exist that can be
distributed directly with LibO at the time being.

No. Those aren't dictionaries for spellchecking at all, have nothing
to do with spellchecking. Use the system's IME instead. You don't need
to use a chinese UI to be able to use a Chinese IME.

ciao
Christian