27 August 2013

502. Spell checking in WPS office on linux -- changing language by replacing the default files

To my great shame I am using a piece of non-FOSS to deal with MS Office files -- namely, WPS. As a junior faculty member it'd be professional suicide to try to force other people to deal with the mis-rendered libreoffice files in MS Office, and for some reason no-one uses PDF anymore when sending out forms...

Anyway, in spite of not being open source and not supporting any open formats, WPS can read and save .doc and .docx files in a way that works together with MS Office, and since it runs natively on linux it's a practical solution until the day libre/openoffice become viable alternatives.

There doesn't seem to be any simple way of changing language beyond replacing the default dictionary files. It ain't pretty, but it works.

In my case I wanted Australian English, so I first installed the myspell dictionary:
sudo apt-get install myspell-en-au
mkdir ~/.dictionaries
sudo mv /opt/kingsoft/wps-office/office6/dicts/main.aff /opt/kingsoft/wps-office/office6/dicts/en_us.aff
sudo mv /opt/kingsoft/wps-office/office6/dicts/main.dic /opt/kingsoft/wps-office/office6/dicts/en_us.dic
sudo cp /usr/share/hunspell/en_AU.dic /opt/kingsoft/wps-office/office6/dicts/main.dic
sudo cp /usr/share/hunspell/en_AU.aff /opt/kingsoft/wps-office/office6/dicts/main.aff

Start WPS and it should now speak 'Strine.

1 comment:

  1. Thanks, it worked for me accept I had to make a folder in the /dicts/ folder and put the to files in it so that WPS would recognise the files as a language that could be selected. (and the 2 " sudo mv " steps both wouldn't work and were unnecessary.

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