Bug 47849 - EDITING: Spell & grammar check "seems" it isn't working
Summary: EDITING: Spell & grammar check "seems" it isn't working
Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME
Alias: None
Product: LibreOffice
Classification: Unclassified
Component: Writer (show other bugs)
Version:
(earliest affected)
3.5.4 release
Hardware: x86-64 (AMD64) Linux (All)
: high major
Assignee: Not Assigned
URL:
Whiteboard: BSA
Keywords:
: 48973 (view as bug list)
Depends on:
Blocks: Spell-Checking
  Show dependency treegraph
 
Reported: 2012-03-25 09:55 UTC by Wyndham Clampett
Modified: 2023-03-31 13:15 UTC (History)
10 users (show)

See Also:
Crash report or crash signature:


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Description Wyndham Clampett 2012-03-25 09:55:30 UTC
Problem description: 
There is usually no indication that the process is doing anything, except when (occasionally) a "not responding" note appears in the dialog title and then the cursor changes to a busy indicator.

This issue is particularly noticeable when working on a long document, such as those with more than ten or twenty pages, and of course frustrating on documents of over one hundred pages.

Steps to reproduce:
1. Start spell check
2. Wait
3. and wait (etc)

Current behavior:
No indication that the spell & grammar check is doing anything - as noted in description

Expected behavior:
There should be some sort of indicator that something is happening. Perhaps a progress bar such as one of these: https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=progress+indicator+gif&hl=en&safe=off&prmd=imvns&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=a01vT9rKE8WM8gOv4eW_DQ&sqi=2&ved=0CDAQsAQ&biw=1374&bih=958 

Platform (if different from the browser): 

Windows 7 Pro 64-bit
              
Browser: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/535.11 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/17.0.963.65 Safari/535.11
Comment 1 sasha.libreoffice 2012-06-19 01:41:55 UTC
Thanks for bugreport
> This issue is particularly noticeable when working on a long document, such as
> those with more than ten or twenty pages, and of course frustrating on
This should not be noticeable. Possibly here we see regression. Some things become very slow comparing with previous version of LibreOffcie.

In any case, developers working on improving performance. LO will more quick in next year.
Comment 2 dickdelfrate 2012-08-17 14:06:49 UTC
Intentionally typing errors with "auto correct" on produces no correction. 
"""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""" then asking spell check to "check" doc, brings up spell check window which says " spell check complete" no errors found. 
Spell check worked fine on my initial use of an early version of Libre office, prior to 3.6 and 3.5.  It didn't work on 3.5 either.
Comment 3 Scott VanKirk 2012-08-17 23:54:58 UTC
This is happening on Windows 7 32bit as well
Comment 4 Scott VanKirk 2012-08-18 00:05:13 UTC
I was able to get rid of this bug by completely deleting my user data directory for Libre
Comment 5 sasha.libreoffice 2012-08-20 07:40:15 UTC
not reproduced in 3.6.0rc on Fedora 64 bit

> Intentionally typing errors with "auto correct" on produces no correction. 
> """""""""""""""""""""""""""""""" then asking spell check to "check" doc, brings
it is not a word, therefore no check. Use letter (alphabet) characters instead
Comment 6 Alan Cummings 2012-08-20 14:41:35 UTC
Version  Build ID: 350m1(Build:2)

Spellcheck does NOT function on any size of document.  

Language settings "refreshed" but did not help.

Linux Mint 13 64 Cinnamon
Comment 7 Florian Reisinger 2012-10-01 11:04:22 UTC
*** Bug 48973 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Comment 8 Florian Reisinger 2012-10-01 11:10:44 UTC
Can reproduce it with corrupt user profile...
Comment 9 Kumāra 2013-09-23 10:19:49 UTC
(In reply to comment #2)
> Intentionally typing errors with "auto correct" on produces no correction. 
> """""""""""""""""""""""""""""""" then asking spell check to "check" doc,
> brings up spell check window which says " spell check complete" no errors
> found. 
> Spell check worked fine on my initial use of an early version of Libre
> office, prior to 3.6 and 3.5.  It didn't work on 3.5 either.

This is unrelated to the OP. Please read carefully.
Comment 10 Kumāra 2013-09-23 10:23:52 UTC
(In reply to comment #9)
> This is unrelated to the OP. Please read carefully.

This applies to comment #2-#8.
Comment 11 Kumāra 2013-09-23 10:27:11 UTC
(In reply to comment #0)
> This issue is particularly noticeable when working on a long document, such
> as those with more than ten or twenty pages, and of course frustrating on
> documents of over one hundred pages.

Are you using a new version now? If so, is it still slow for you?

FYI, I've a 70-page document, using LanguageTool extension for grammar checking. It takes a while, but not too bad.
Comment 12 QA Administrators 2015-04-01 14:42:40 UTC Comment hidden (obsolete)
Comment 13 tommy27 2016-04-16 07:25:31 UTC Comment hidden (obsolete)
Comment 14 Neo 2016-06-29 17:51:51 UTC
Guys, I know that LibreOffice is extremely complicated and I know that people are writing it for little or no compensation, however, much better quality control is needed to weed out such fundamental bugs.  I can confirm that spell check is not working on my system (latest version, Windows 8.1).  I've read about corrupt user profiles and deleting other configuration files.  This is not acceptable.  I say this as a software engineer myself. Unfortunately I've come to conclude that this software is still too immature to be a viable replacement for MS Office.  I was recently working on a document and spell check didn't work. I am beyond caring about the reasons why it fails because I am now in a position where I have to produce results. This is extremely important to me because I am trying to get my local city government to abandon MS Office and its costly licenses but the average secretary will not care why spell check doesn't work. She will simply complain to the supervisor who will say that Libreoffice is not worth the trouble and that they should switch back to MS Office. I'm on your side, but stuff like this really needs to never happen.
Comment 15 Tony Bazeley 2016-07-25 04:53:47 UTC
Spell check doesn't work for me in this version.
Have tried wiping the config files to no effect.

Installed 5.2.0.2 using snap according using the procedure at  https://skyfromme.wordpress.com/  -- spell check does not work

Installed 5.0.6.3 which has the expected behavior.

Test: open new document and enter some obvious spelling errors.
No auto spell check indicators
F7 does a spell check and reports completion with no errors detected
Comment 16 Kumāra 2016-07-31 10:20:02 UTC
(In reply to Tony Bazeley from comment #15)
> Spell check doesn't work for me in this version.
> Have tried wiping the config files to no effect.
> 
> Installed 5.2.0.2 using snap according using the procedure at 
> https://skyfromme.wordpress.com/  -- spell check does not work
> 
> Installed 5.0.6.3 which has the expected behavior.
> 
> Test: open new document and enter some obvious spelling errors.
> No auto spell check indicators
> F7 does a spell check and reports completion with no errors detected

You're not reporting correctly. Please open a new report.

Nonetheless, such a problem is usually an issue on the user side. I suggest asking for help at a LibreOffice forum.
Comment 17 clan.moore.44 2017-03-17 04:39:15 UTC
Spellcheck was working fine until current version: Version: 5.2.6.2
Build ID: 5.2.6-1
CPU Threads: 8; OS Version: Linux 4.9; UI Render: default; VCL: kde4; 
Locale: en-US (en_US.UTF-8); Calc: group.
Not working.
Comment 18 agencelivre 2017-04-07 15:46:51 UTC
Spellcheck does not work. It is sluggish - taking more than 1.5 minutes when commanded to ignore. After a couple of episodes of this behaviour I thought it was working but it is not. It only goes through the motions. Does not ignore or add to dictionary; when "correcting" it goes through the motions but makes no correction. I am uncertain as to whether the program is actually saving any changes because spellcheck made LO crash & the reopened version had no corrections/changes
Comment 19 Xisco Faulí 2017-06-12 10:53:29 UTC
Changing version back to the earliest version affected.
Comment 20 Paul 2017-07-02 04:32:49 UTC
Version: 5.3.3.2
Build ID: 1:5.3.3~rc2-0ubuntu0.16.04.1~lo0
CPU Threads: 2; OS Version: Linux 4.4; UI Render: default; VCL: gtk2; Layout Engine: new; 
Locale: en-CA (en_CA.UTF-8); Calc: group

Spell check, and auto correct not working at all. Relevant dictionaries are installed, and auto correct is enabled from the tool menu.
Comment 21 Glen 2017-11-14 02:21:25 UTC
Spell check just will not work in New Zealand English
Comment 22 QA Administrators 2018-11-15 03:44:02 UTC Comment hidden (obsolete)
Comment 23 Telesto 2020-09-07 07:35:03 UTC
Is this still needed? Spell checker is pretty fast
Version: 7.1.0.0.alpha0+ (x64)
Build ID: e8b8e7be0b2ad693224cd94062a55610eb69df7e
CPU threads: 4; OS: Windows 6.3 Build 9600; UI render: Skia/Raster; VCL: win
Locale: nl-NL (nl_NL); UI: en-US
Calc: CL
Comment 24 Luke Kendall 2022-06-30 12:55:31 UTC
Spell check in Writer stopped working reliably something like nine months ago. It's now unusable. It stops and starts, bails out early, gets trapped in loops, finishes early, and is basically completely unreliable. Each time I run it it starts at a different point (regardless of the text insertion point), and finds different things, and stops after a while, if it keeps working.

It's become useless. I spend more time trying to make it work, and trying to decide if it's scanned all the text, than using it productively.

My workaround is to save a parallel copy of the file as plain text, and use a spell checker like hunspell or aspell on that, and then find any words in Writer separately.
Comment 25 Tex2002ans 2022-09-07 05:19:57 UTC
(In reply to Luke Kendall from comment #24)
> Spell check in Writer stopped working reliably something like nine months
> ago. It's now unusable.

Luke, have you tried resetting your User Profile?

- Help > Restart in Safe Mode.
- Click radio button for "Reset to factory settings".
- Check both boxes under that radio button.
- Press "Apply Changes and Restart".

You may have a corrupt user profile. That should cleanly reset LibreOffice as if you were installing from complete scratch.
Comment 26 Manjunathan 2023-02-02 17:21:51 UTC
Not Reproduced.
Results-Bug no reproduced.
Version-Ubuntu 22.04.1 LTS 64bit.
bug-Not indicated grammer mistake and spells.
Status-confirmed
Comment 27 Stéphane Guillou (stragu) 2023-03-31 13:15:16 UTC
No one here reproduced the issue since 5.3.3, and the ticket is becoming a mixed bag of loosely described issues related to spellcheck.

Luke's issue in comment 24 is tracked in bug 138815. If anyone hits the Resume loop or premature spellcheck end in recent versions, please see that one (for Linux) or bug 48114 (presumably for Windows).
For other issues, please check in the meta bug 96000 if an existing ticket corresponds to your specific issue. If not, please create a new ticket.

Thank you!