Hello everyone,
In recent years I have actually mainly developed the LibreOffice extension from LanguageTool on my own.
There is now an alternative in LibreOffice to have the grammar check carried out via the LanguageTool server. In this respect, I can understand the team’s decision to no longer officially support the extension.
Nevertheless, I believe that it still makes sense for everyone who writes longer texts to use the extension for the following reasons:
- The extension runs on the local machine. No remote server is needed.
- The extension supports all rules working on the level of full text (e.g., opening and closing quotes are recognized even if they are more than one paragraph away from each other).
- The extension uses the LanguageTool spell checker in addition to that of Libreoffice.
- The extension supports grammar checking of Impress and Calc documents (Only manual checking by the LT check dialog. An automated check is not supported by LibreOffice.)
- The extension offers a configuration dialog:
- Easily activate / deactivate optional rules
- Easily deactivate / reactivate default rules
- Define custom colors and styles for rule groups or single rules
- Change parameters for some special rules
- Define profiles to check different kinds of documents
- The extension works with caching, which makes repeated work on long texts much easier.
- The extension offers the possibility of statistical analyses, such as frequently used words, filler words, etc. (for individual languages).
What’s next?
I will now continue the application under the name WritingTool (WT) based on LanguageTool.
You can find it here: GitHub - FredKruse/writingtool: WritingTool for libreOffice based on LanguageTool
Unfortunately, I don’t yet have an infrastructure to, for example, automatically create OXT files with the latest changes in LT and WT every day. I’m thinking about how I could set up and operate one.
Furthermore, I’m also now cut off from the mechanisms for internationalization. I would appreciate it if people could be found to help me translate the relevant files. (I’m only able to maintain English and German.)
It would be nice if all of you who have used the extension so far would continue to use it under the new name (WT), test errors and give suggestions.
The latest development will be to support (local) AI and thus provide another option for finding errors and editing text passages. However, this is still at a very early stage, and I am testing it primarily for German texts. Here, too, I am still looking for people who would like to support the project with testing and suggestions.