WPS Office Spellcheck Not Working

Well they chose to support Debian and Red Hat specifically... convincing them to support Arch and other types of distros is really a business decision that can be hard to get through. From a business perspective, the Linux market generates very little revenue; and a Linux sub-market even less.

From the business point of view, the Linux market is notorious for asking everything and giving near-to-nothing in sales.

The other option is for the community to find why it breaks on Arch and find a work-around.

I complained since nobody else wants to. I'll post any reply that I get here.

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I had sent an email a while ago and got no reply, let's see how this go and keep us posted!

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I have not yet gotten an email back either...
Edit 8/26: Still nothing.

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This is a continuation of a discussion started 5 months ago

5 months later, spellcheck still doesnā€™t work. Me and various others have written to WPS and got to answer.

The truth is, Arch Linux is not officially supported, and the AUR is a community-made hack to support it. It doesnā€™t seem WPS has any interest in adding official support for Arch.

WPS Office AUR package is here
https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/wps-office

Dictionaries are here
https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/wps-office-all-dicts-win-languages

Without waiting for WPS, is there anything else the community can to do solve this problem? Any way to debug and know what the actual error is?

I found all open-source alternatives to be lack-buster in terms of features, and Iā€™m lacking a good writing environment with proper spellchecking. The best I have is typing in Grammerly in the browser, or using Google Docs, but nothing that doesnā€™t rely on the browser.

Clever! Probably some crafty person reverse-engineered the .deb. Witchcraft!

This seems unlikely, as WPS is not open-source. Even if there was community interest in contributing to WPS, you canā€™t exactly put together a MR for a closed-source project.

Are you sure you want to use this software? Not only is it proprietary, itā€™s made by some a giant Chinese software company. Also, why is it a 1.5 GB download, when the entire LibreOffice suite is only 400 MB? :thinking:

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While I personally detest snaps, I believe WPS Office is available as a snap. Perhaps that may solve your issue, (as long as you don't mind someone looking over your shoulder while you work). :rofl:

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The Chinese have a camera per 6 habitats. Why would they need to spy in software?

I think he was referring to Canonical--I believe Snaps have in-built telemetry. :eyes:

I also don't like how Ubuntu is making everything a Snap--not only Firefox and Chromium, but even little apps like Gedit, the calendar, and the calculator.

What is really alarming are the stories of people purging Snap from their system, only to install something Ubuntu has decided is a Snap by default and have Ubuntu automatically reinstall the whole Snap infrastructure! :scream:

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After using everything else available over a course of time, my favorite du jour is overwhelmingly OnlyOffice Editors in both Linux and Windows. Not only does it um, do an awesome job of editing* MS Office formats, and has a working spell check. Windows version.

*editing includes creating.

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Unfortunately it is necessary sometimes to use this software. I hate it as itā€™s closed source Chinese software but nothing has compatibility with Microsoft Office anywhere near as good and Iā€™ve tried them all with PowerPoint and templates etc between Microsoft office and these office suites. It means I donā€™t have to use Windows but I have to use this software because of that

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Trick to have spell check working in WPS 2019

Hi,

Iā€™m new on the forum and in fact not a Garuda Linux user (Iā€™m on Manjaro). However Iā€™ve been trying to use WPS office on my laptop (I used the Flatpak version) and faced the same issue as e.g. @Grimy1928 and @Hanuman on this forum: spell check was not working! Reading the post from @Hanuman here:

I can confirm that spell check is only working for french but not in any other language. However, recognizing this fact, I came up with a simple fix to have WPS spell check working with any language!

First (if not already existent) start by creating the folder fr_FR in WPS dictionary folder:

mkdir ~/.local/share/Kingsoft/office6/dicts/fr_FR

In this folder create a file named dict.conf with the following content:

[Dictionary]
DisplayName=Multilingual (symlink)
DisplayName[en_US]=Multilingual (symlink)

Finally create the following bash script (name it e.g. wps_spell) and make it executable:

#!/bin/bash
HUNSPELL_DIR="/usr/share/hunspell"
DICT_DIR="/home/$(whoami)/.local/share/Kingsoft/office6/dicts/fr_FR"

read -p "Type language code to use (e.g. en_US, fr_CH etc): " LNG

# Test if selected language exists in Hunspell"
if test -f "$HUNSPELL_DIR/$LNG.dic"; then
    ln -sf $HUNSPELL_DIR/$LNG.dic $DICT_DIR/main.dic
    ln -sf $HUNSPELL_DIR/$LNG.aff $DICT_DIR/main.aff
    echo "Language successfully set to $LNG!"
else
    echo "ERROR: Language $LNG was not found in $HUNSPELL_DIR. Please try again."
fi

If you want to make it run from anywhere, just place this script in ~/.local/bin (or anywhere on your PATH)

What this script does is to create symlinks from Hunspell dictionaries (*.dic and *.aff files) already present on your system (/usr/share/hunspell), naming them main.dic and main.aff in the fr_FR folder you created. When you run the script, youā€™re asked which language you want to use for spell checking. If you want to use american english, type en_US. If you want to use british english, type en_GB. If you want french, type fr_FR etc. You just need to make sure that you have the proper dictionaries in /usr/share/hunspell. Then type enter and the script will make the appropriate symlink in the fr_FR folder. The trick is to use any language but only use the fr_FR as french is the only language which works for spell checking in WPS. Final step: in WPS, go to Review tab, clisk on the arrow on the right of spell check and click ā€œSet Languageā€. Then always select Multinlingual (symlink)

If you want to switch language on the fly (without restarting WPS), just run the script again, choose another language and then reselect ā€œSet languageā€ = Multinlingual (symlink) in WPS, and youā€™re good to go!

This works fine on my system (Manjaro). Try it on Garuda and let me know if that works too. This is not a definitive fix to the problem but just a trick that makes WPS spell check work with minimal burden.

Hope this helps those (as me) that NEED 100% MS office compatibility to work and are stuck with WPS!

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If you want a good spell and grammar checker, there is LanguageTool, a standalone app, browser add-on, or use it on their website.

I have two apps installed for LanguageTools, can't remember if both are needed or dependencies, but they are; 'languagetool' in Arch repos, 'languagetool-code-comments-bin' is in AUR.

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I thought this was standard, I've been using it for a long time, but only in the browser. :slight_smile:

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I love it. I think 'Languagetool' in Arch is just a back-end, because I think there is also an app to add to WPS Office (haven't tried it though), but the 'languagetool-code-comments-bin' makes it a standalone app, which is great.

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Can't find a languagetool plugin for WPS (there are for Libreoffice and Openoffice). The standalone app is great but I need to write in WPS to collaborate with colleagues using MS Word and constantly copy-pasting from languagetool to WPS is a pain. The symlink fix is much more convenient to me although Hunspell probably doesn't do grammar checks.

The symlink fix seems to work in WPS Writer, spreadsheet and presentation. However, incorrect words are only underlined in Writer, not in spreadsheet nor presentation (but spell check still work). Don't know if there is a fix for that but I essentially need this feature in Writer to identify typos as I type, and it wotks fine there.