Posted: Wed Apr 01, 2009 7:34 pm Post subject: Thesaurus for Australian English
I apologise in advance if this has been addressed elsewhere. I have had a look around, but not been able to sort it out.
I have NeoOffice 3, downloaded 31 March, and have the Australian language settings ticked, but cannot activate the thesaurus. I saw the bug for this in the Early Release programme, but that indicated it was mended in January?
I have some bad news, there is no thesaurus for Australian English. NeoOffice gets dictionaries and thesauri from its underlying OpenOffice.org code and from an extension site maintained by OpenOffice.org.
Dictionaries and thesauri are handled a little differently in NeoOffice 3.0. To install a thesaurus other than those bundled with the application, the Extension Manager must be used. To install a thesaurus, launch NeoOffice and select the Tools :: Language :: More Dictionaries Online... menu. There will be a variety of extensions, including some thesauri that can be installed.
When I went to the online site at OpenOffice.org, which is this page, I could only find a dictionary for Australian English, not a thesaurus. Unfortunately no one has created an thesaurus for Australian English.
I had one in OO 2 - is there any way that can be transferred over?
Unfortunately, the answer is no. For some reason, starting in OpenOffice.org 3.0 Sun Microsystems' OpenOffice.org engineers completely dropped the old method for installing spellcheckers, hyphenators, and thesauri and forced all of these to be installed as an OpenOffice.org extension.
From my short search on the web, it seems this change left those items missing for many languages since as for many languages, the files were created by volunteer open source projects that are not associated with OpenOffice.org.
IMHO, while the old installation method was not the greatest, it worked well and this new requirement that the same old files must be bundled into an OpenOffice.org extension seems to have caused no real benefit and only pain.
I had one in OO 2 - is there any way that can be transferred over?
If you still have the thesaurus file from v2, yes, it can be transferred over with some effort. Essentially you'd have to create a thesaurus extension and then install it in Neo 3. It's not exactly straightforward, but it's not terribly difficult, either; instructions are here in the usual OOo Germanish English.
Edit: Cross-posted with Patrick.
pluby wrote:
IMHO, while the old installation method was not the greatest, it worked well and this new requirement that the same old files must be bundled into an OpenOffice.org extension seems to have caused no real benefit and only pain.
Agreed. I had to create my own Arabic dictionary extension for Neo 3, whereas before I simply had to install two files I found on the web and make one simple, easy-to-understand change to dictionaries.lst.
Smokey _________________ "[...] whether the duck drinks hot chocolate or coffee is irrelevant." -- ovvldc and sardisson in the NeoWiki
You cannot post new topics in this forum You cannot reply to topics in this forum You cannot edit your posts in this forum You cannot delete your posts in this forum You cannot vote in polls in this forum You cannot attach files in this forum You cannot download files in this forum
