March 11, 2019

LibreOffice Malayalam spellchecker using mlmorph

A detailed note by Santhosh Thottingal.

A few months back, I wrote about the spellchecker based on Malayalam morphology analyser.  I was also trying to intergrate that spellchecker with LibreOffice. It  is not yet ready for any serious usage, but if you are curious and would  like to help me in its further development, please read on.

Current status

The libreoffice spellchecker for Malayalam is available at https://gitlab.com/smc/mlmorph-libreoffice-spellchecker. You need to get the code using git checkout or download the master version as zip file

You need LibreOffice 4.1 or later. Latest version is recommended. In the source code directory, run make install to install the extension.

Open libreoffice writer, add some Malayalam text. Make sure to select  the language as Malayalam by choosing it from the menu or bottom status  bar. You should see the spelling check in action… if everything goes as  expected ;-)

LibreOffice language settings, You can see mlmorph listed.

Spellchecker in action- libreoffice writer.

How can you help?

Theoretically, the extension should work in non-Linux platforms as  well. But I have not tested it. The extension need python3 and  python-hfst for the operating system. But python-hfst is not available for Windows 64 bit python installation. If you test  and get the extension working, please add documentation and if anything  missing to make the installation more easy, let me know.

As the mlmorph project get wider support for Malayalam vocabulary, the quality of spellchecker improves automatically.

This was originally written by Santhosh Thottingal and published at thottingal.in