Penguin
Recent Changes

Installing and Setting up NewZealand English Dictionary

By default, OOo comes with installed dictionaries for US English, French and Spanish.

Since OpenOffice.org 3.0, dictionary support can be added via the Extension manager. Packages are available from extensions.services.openoffice.org for New Zealand English and New Zealand Maori

In 2.x versions go to File → Wizards → Install new dictionary to use the OOoDic Autopilot. Click on “English”, press the "Start DicOOo" button, and use the dialog to download any needed dictionaries, hyphenations, or thesauri.

Users of old versions (prior to 1.1.1) can install dictionaries manually (a tedious and longwinded process).

Converting OpenDocument Text documents to plaintext

odt2txt is a utility for converting OpenOffice.org word processor documents to plaintext files. To convert a large number of documents, use the following command:

find -name '*.odt' -print0 | xargs -r0 bash -c 'for odt in "$@"; do odt2txt.py "$odt" > "${odt%.odt}.txt"; done' --

Installing new fonts

Note: I don’t know how useful the following is. chkfontpath appears to be a RedHat-ism, and is possibly obsolete as well. —AristotlePagaltzis

When loading, OpenOffice.org looks for TrueType or Type1 fonts in the following places:

  • In /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/Type1
  • In the output of the command chkfontpath
  • In the fontpath as returned by XGetFontPath()
  • In the directories listed in the EnvironmentVariable SAL_FONTPATH_PRIVATE, which is usually set to share/fonts/truetype below the installation path of OpenOffice.org by the soffice launcher

This method to install fonts hooks into the output of chkfontpath. We’ll assume you have copied a font family called Foob Ar into /usr/share/fonts/foobar/. The following commands have to be issued as root.

mkfontdir /usr/share/fonts/foobar
chkfontpath -a /usr/share/fonts/foobar/

This creates a fonts.dir file in your font family directory, then adds the directory to chkfontpath’s list. Now retstart OpenOffice.org and your pretty new fonts should be available. You may like to change the default font under Tools → Options → Text Document → Basic Fonts.

See also the OpenOffice.org Font FAQ.

Using Windows fonts from a mount point

To include the TrueType fonts from your MicrosoftWindows installation you need to create a font directory with SymLinks to all the fonts on your Windows partition. Assuming the fonts are in C:\windows\fonts and the C: partition of Windows is mounted on /mnt/win_c in Linux, you have to do the following (as root):

mkdir /usr/share/fonts/winfonts
cd /mnt/win_c/windows/fonts
ln -s *.ttf *.TTF /usr/share/fonts/winfonts
cd /usr/share/fonts/winfonts
ttmkfdir
mkfontdir
chkfontpath -a /usr/share/fonts/winfonts
fc-cache