the weekly whinge

I’ve been persuading friends and family that using OpenOffice is going to save the planet and all the fluffly ikkle animals and everything.

I’ve been using the Novell-sponsored go-oo version (from go-oo.org) because it seems to have better compatibility with the MS stuff as well as being quicker and generally more fluffy-ikkle-animal-friendly; however it looks like something they’ve done has caused the British English thesaurus to break. I’m assuming it’s Go-oo’s fault because the standard OO install on Harry’s machine (on the next desk) is fine.

Anyway, after some hours of searching the web for a solution (all of which seemed to be based around editing a file which no longer exists in oo3) for now I’ve packaged up my own extension based on the stock en-gb dictionary and PaulH’s thesaurus from brit-thesaurus.sourceforge.net

Apparently this could also be useful if you don’t like the fact that the British English thesaurus in ooo actually points at the en_US version anyway…

So here it is. Just install it and restart OO, that should do it. Let me know if it’s broken.

Edit: to install (assuming that just opening the file doesn’t work) go to Tools->Extension Manager in OpenOffice, click “Add” and navigate to wherever you saved the file!

Tags: british english, en-gb, en-uk, en_GB, go-oo, oo v3, ooo3, openoffice, openoffice v3, thesaurus, uk english.