[Issue] No "English Sentence Checking" in Settings (LO)

[LastUnicorn]

LibreOffice v7.2.1.2 32-bit -- Portable from PortableApps.

I am using the above noted version of LibreOffice. I am working my way through the LibreOffice 7.2 Getting Started Guide. On page 62 of the guide there is mention of settings that can be made regarding grammar checking. That section of the 'Guide' has the title "English sentence checking". In theory the settings should be available via (menu) Tools > Options... > Language Settings > English Sentence Checking. The problem is that in my install of LibreOffice no such setting "English sentence checking" exists. So my questions are:

1. Why is the setting not there?

2. Is there something I have to do to get those setting options to show up?

I did have a look on the internet for information on this but the only things I could find were circa 2014-ish and for a very much older version of LibreOffice.

[Hagar Delest]

Weird. I have the exact same portable version (64bit) on my Windows 10 machine and I do have the section:

Language.png (11.28 KiB) Viewed 8402 times

[LastUnicorn]

Thanks very much for the response Hagar.

I messed around with this for hours and finally worked out what the fault was, but not a fix for the fault. Basically I had in a fresh install of LibreOffice 7.2.1.2 portable updated the English Spellchecker supplied by Marco Pinto (the maintainer of the English speller extension). As best as I can figure things the speller contains a component that controls "English Sentence Checking" settings for Options... > Language Settings. What the problem seems to be I have detailed in the screenshot below. Basically I think the updated speller is bugged, or LibreOffice is bugged, or both. Just now it seems that if you manually update the English speller then it breaks the component that supplies the "English Sentence Checking" in LibreOffice Options.

https://thumbs2.imgbox.com/f4/c1/3wdXorJk_t.png

As I have some contact with Marco Pinto I'll email him and ask that he has a look at this thread and see if he will comment.

If you want to look into this yourself then I get the speller updates from here: Marco Pinto English Speller Updates If you install the latest update and it messes up your LibreOffice then to restore, in Extension Manager, just 'Remove' the update you installed and LibreOffice (I discovered) rolls-back the speller to the version installed by default as part of the original install routine (and your LibreOffice Options is working properly again).

Unfortunately I can't check this on a fully installed version of LibreOffice, at least for now, I only have the portable version from PortableApps.

[Hagar Delest]

Confirmed, clearly a bug!
Reproduced on the 7.2 portable version (x86) and 7.0 and 7.2 on xubuntu.

[Bill]

I've also reproduced with LO 6.3.3 and LO 7.1.3 AppImage versions (from LO) on Ubuntu MATE.

[LastUnicorn]

Thanks for testing Bill.

I emailed Marco and got one response but I don't know how to interpret his response as he didn't explicitly say if this was or was not a bug with the speller extension. I have today emailed back asking for clarification on that point; so now I have to wait on his response to that request.

Above said, I was looking at the screenshot I posted and noticed something that I hadn't noticed before:

If you look at the first image titled 1 - LibreOffice 7.2.1.1 - Fresh Install - Default English Speller then you can see that the name of the extension is given as "English spelling dictionaries, hyphenation rules, thesaurus, and grammar checker 2021.05.01"

However, now look at the image 3 - LibreOffice 7.2.1.2 - Fresh Install - Manually Updated English Speller you can see that after the update the title of the speller has changed to "English spelling, hyphenation dictionaries and thesaurus 2021.10.01" So, it seems the 'grammar checker' part of the extension title has been dropped from the extension title. Weird. (What is doing what to what.)

[Hagar Delest]

No picture uploaded...
I tried to browse the release notes of the extension but haven't found much information on the changes.

[LastUnicorn]

Hagar, the pictures I was referring to are in the original screenshot that I gave in my earlier post above i.e.. the ones you have already looked at here: https://imgbox.com/3wdXorJk. You can see the change of title in those screenshots. Apologies for not being clear.

[LastUnicorn]

In preparation for filing a bug report of my own I did some rooting around at Bugzilla and found the bug has already been reported. If you want to follow, the report is here: Bug 140516 - Manual update English dictionary disables sentence checking. That report was filed on 18 Feb. 2021.

I note that Marco is already subscribed to updates on the bug.

As yet the bug has not been assigned to anyone. So I think it's a "Maybe sometime we'll get around to it" sort of bug.

[Hagar Delest]

Good catch!
A workaround would be to take the dictionary files from the extension to replace those from the default install.

But I'm sure there is some parameter linked to Lightproof (the grammar checker that seems to be involved here) that is in a configuration file of the default install and that could be put back after the extension installation. No time to investigate in detail right now however.

[LastUnicorn]

Hagar, thanks for the tip on just replacing the dictionaries from the update speller into the folder with the default speller files. Seems to work just fine. For anyone wanting to try this the following is what I did:

1. If you have already manually updated the speller then open Extension Manager, click on the speller in the extensions list to highlight it, click on the Remove button and then shutdown and restart LibreOffice. Doing this will cause LibreOffice to roll-back to the speller version that was installed as default when you first installed LibreOffice to your system.
2. Go here and download the latest English Speller Dictionary: English dictionaries for LibreOffice
3. In the default install of LO find the folder titled dict-en that contains the following files (among many other files): Lightproof.components; Lightproof.py; Linguistic.xcu and README_lightproof_en.txt. As best as I can figure it those files are all directly related to Lightproof. That dict-en folder also contains three (sub-)folders: dialog; META-INF and pythonpath.
4. Having found the correct dict-en folder make a backup of that entire folder and save it off somewhere for future use should you need to roll-back to the default-install speller.
5. Now open the English speller (so-called 'dictionary') update file you downloaded using a file archiver e.g. 7-Zip.
6. In the opened archive highlight all the files and only the files and copy them into the dict-en folder you identified in step '1' above (do not copy over the META-INF folder or any of its content contained in the archive). Note that you will be overwriting most of the files in that dict-en folder so just 'okay' to all of that.
7. That is you done. You should now have an updated English speller in your LibreOffice and the Lightproof "English Sentence Checking" should still be functioning.

Warning: if you do the above then you will not be able to use Extension Manager to roll-back to the default speller version that was supplied with LibreOffice — this is why you need the back-up as mentioned above to do a roll-back. To do the roll-back just shutdown LibreOffice delete all the content of the dict-en folder and then copy into it all the content, files and folders, you made as a back-up. Then restart LibreOffice and you should find yourself back at square one.

If you want to do a check that you do indeed have an updated speller installed and that it is working properly after doing the above then do the following:

1. Open a new document in Writer and if necessary temporarily adjust your settings so that it will check the document in English (UK) language.
2. Go (menu) Tools → Extension Manager. And in the dialogue that opens make a note of the date of the Marco Pinto English Dictionary
3. Go to this webpage: en_GB_CHANGES And, once there, look for the date of the dictionary that you noted down from Extension Manager. (If you installed the latest version of the speller then that will be at bottom of the list.) Once you have found the correct date the list that is below that date is a list of the words that were add to the speller for that version of the speller — you can use any of those words to see if you successfully installed the latest speller to your LibreOffice via the instructions given above.

And that is as far as my limited understanding of this problem will get me.

On another tack, it is interesting to note that the downloaded speller .oxt archive contains only one folder META-INF and there is a manifest.xml file inside that folder. This is the same arrangement that is in the dict-en folder. However, the content of the manifest.xml document in the archive does not match the content of the manifest.xml in the dict-en subfolder. The manifest.xml document in the dict-en subfolder does explicitly reference (among other things) Lightproof but the same document in the download archive does not (there are other significant differences too but what they are indicating is beyond my level expertise).

Also it is the case that the archive file does not contain the folders dialog or pythonpath -- which do exist, with content, in the dict-en folder. Likewise it is the case that the archive does not contain the files Lightproof.components; Lightproof.py; Linguistic.xcu and README_lightproof_en.txt.

So taking all that into account it does seem to be the case that speller update archives have components missing that should get all this to work fine in a straightforward update of the speller via Extension Manager. That said, if I read in the dict-en folder the file titled README_lightproof_en.txt that seems to be implying that the Lightproof component of the speller is effectively a separate component, or a separate extension, from the speller extension even if it does 'bolt in' on the speller. That component is coded by a László Németh. If that is the case then it might not be the responsibility of the speller maintainer to manage integration with the Lightproof components. Mmm... All of that/this strikes me as 'messy' and a lack of coordination somewhere along the line -- seems to me it might be more of a management problem at LIbreOffice's end than a technical one; after all, they are getting it right on each official release of LibreOffice and that implies that with this issue there is a lack of coordination with all the people that should be involved in an update of the speller.