548. A lot has been happening with Kingsoft WPS

Seems like they have been making progress.

I wrote my original post about wps (also see this post) for version 8.1.0.3724, and on this site they are currently at 9.1.0.4244 -- Alpha 12, patch 3. Judging from all the bugs that have been fixed it seems that the devs have been quite busy. The short interval between different alpha version also indicates that the development is very active. Good stuff.

Basically, WPS is the only reasonable (subjective) solution for reading .docx files on linux that I've encountered.

Either way,if you have a previous version of wps installed, remove it

sudo apt-get autoremove wps-office:i386

Then get on with it:

mkdir ~/tmp
cd ~/tmp
sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386
sudo apt-get update
wget http://wdl.cache.ijinshan.com/wps/download/Linux/unstable/kingsoft-office_9.1.0.4244~a12p3_i386.deb
sudo dpkg -i kingsoft-office_9.1.0.4244~a12p3_i386.deb
sudo apt-get install -f

Missing fonts. Clicking on the link takes you indirectly to bbs.wpn.cn, which is in Chinese.

To sort out the fonts issue above you can join bbs.wpn.cn as shown in this post, then download the wps_symbol_fonts.zip file from this post. Install the fonts by doing

cp ~/Downloads/wps_symbol_fonts.zip ~/.fonts
cd ~/.fonts
unzip wps_symbol_fonts.zip

And start WPS. The 'symbol' issue should be solved. Either way, the look of WPS has been updated, and now it can handle my test file which even MS offerings are struggling with:

See here for a post where I compare different office suites using that file (older post): http://verahill.blogspot.com.au/2013/01/313-which-office-for-linux-users.html

To sort out mime types/file associations do

sudo update-desktop-database /usr/local/share/applications/
sudo update-mime-database /usr/share/mime/

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.