[Solved] Automate addition of words to spellcheck dictionary

[ars]

I am very nearly a first-time user of OO 4.0.1 running on Mac OS X 10.6.8.

My first act was to open my treatise, written on MS Word version ca. 10 or 11 (2003), in Open Office Writer. There are maybe hundreds of specialty words (including proper names) in the document flagged by OO spellcheck.

I spent maybe ten minutes adding unrecognized words to the "Standard" spellcheck dictionary one-at-a-time using the "Add" button in the "Spelling and Grammar" window, which got me through a few pages. To plow through the whole document in this fashion seems tedious and laborious. I am hoping it is also unnecessary in order to get all the unrecognized words into the spellcheck dictionary.

My question is: Is there a way to get all the words in a pre-existing document that are unknown to, and flagged by, the OOW spellcheck dictionary into the spellcheck dictionary without having to go through all of them in the "Spelling and Grammar" window one-at-a-time?

[floris v]

I haven't used the spell check window for a very long time, and you should stop using it, certainly for this kind of job. It is tedious, soul destroying and error prone, because it's so easy to click the wrong button once you've sufficiently bored, irritated and tired. Instead turn on spell check as you type, type a space to activate it, then right click the special terms and add them to the standard or a custom dictionary. If you have a list of those words, you can add that to the dictionary file, which is found in a sub folder of the user profile. See viewtopic.php?f=74&t=12426 for information about that.

[ars]

I have tried the right-click-and-add approach; it may be faster. I'm assuming when you say "right click the special terms," you mean "one at a time." This leaves it up to me to locate the highlighted words; using the "Spelling and Grammar" window, the program produces the unrecognized terms automatically. I'll try both for a while and see if I develope a clear preference.

The computer on which the document was originally written is gone, along with whatever spellcheck dictionary files were generated or updated by the spellcheck process back in the day. The document itself is my only source for these specialty terms. I knew I was eventually going to have to re-recognize them with a new dictionary one way or the other.

Unfortunately, I don't have a separate list of the words. I leave it up to the Spellcheck to tell me which terms are unrecognized. I suppose another way of stating my original question is: Is there a[n automatic] way to isolate all the words in a document unrecognized by the Spellcheck, directly from the text of the document itself, and list them for collective treatment such as adding them all directly to the Spellcheck dictionary?

[RusselB]

Even if you had the dictionary list from the original computer, I doubt it would be of much use, as it would be configured for Word to work with it, rather than Writer.
It sounds like what you're looking for, is, basically, an Add All button... which Writer doesn't have.
An option that I have thought of, but haven't checked, is to see if there's an extension for Writer that has this capability.

[RoryOF]

There are two steps needed - extract all "red-lined" words into a plain text file; this presumes that all such words are correct - then insert the plain text file into a standard or special dictionary. As the OO dictionaries are Hunspell format, investigation on their site might prove useful, but the presumption of correctness of the red-lined words is a major assumption.

There is discussion on a related problem at
Creating and mass populating Custom Dictionary

Here is a topic on the extraction of the red-lined words
[Solved] Add all underlined words to dictionary

[ars]

@ RoryOF: This is exactly the sort of answer I was looking for, and I am embarrassed that it escaped my notice that it come up eight or nine years ago. I searched as diligently as I could before posting this topic from the beginner's page. This is about the complexity of solution I was expecting to find.

I don't know if I should mark this question "solved" before I actually try the suggestion involving the macro myself, as it appears I have a bit of a learning curve to undertake before I can utilize the instructions as posted back in 2007.

I am confident in the red-lined words; they are mostly proper names, some foreign-language expressions and some musical terms including theory and analysis. There is no way any of them would make it through a spell-check without being added beforehand. The treatise has already been defended and published; I am using it to populate the spellcheck dictionary.

[ars]

Per Rory's advice, I consulted the forum topic [Solved] Add all underlined words to dictionary, and followed the instructions, which were to paste the macro text below into the "edit macro" window and run it. As of December 2007, it ran on Tommy's PC, per the thread there.

(Edit) Nevermind; I think I found answer to question. I should have read the above topic to the end.

(Edit 2) The version of the macro from the Tommy post on March 8 2009 still doesn't complete without generating an error message. I posted my question at the forum above, although it is the first post there since 3-8-09.

[John_Ha]

For others searching, whose file has just been transferred from MS Word, rather than 13 years ago, can you export the words stored in the MS Word added words dictionary? If so, just open the AOO added words dictionary, and add the words to it, being sure to sort to alphabetical order after doing so.

See Use only custom dictionaries? for how to do it and the precautions you need to take.