LanguageTool
Open Source language checker
An Open Source language checker for English, German, Polish, Dutch, and other languages.
This is a rule-based language checker that will find errors for which a rule is defined in its
XML configuration files. Rules for more complicated errors can be written in Java. You can think
of LanguageTool as a tool to detect errors that a simple spell checker cannot detect, e.g. mixing
up there/their, no/now etc. It can also detect some
grammar mistakes. It does not include spell checking. See the 
languages
page for a list of supported languages.
Update 2008-11-02: Released version 0.9.5. Changes include:
- Updated rules for English and Polish
- Fixed crashes with OpenOffice.org integration
- Fixed some false alarms in the German agreement rule
For a more detailed list of changes, see
the Changelog.
Update 2008-10-06: The LanguageTool maintainer team (Marcin Miłkowski and Daniel Naber) just received a Gold Award in the Sun Microsystems Community Innovation Program! The work honored with this award is both the OpenOffice.org integration that is part of LanguageTool 0.9.4 or later (download below) and the Community website that lets you browse LanguageTool's error rules and vote whether an error message is useful or not.
Update June 2008: Please visit our new
LanguageTool Community website that lets you browse all rules for all languages. You can even create
new (simple) rules if you're logged in.
This version works only with OpenOffice.org 3.0.0, NOT with 3.0.1 or its beta releases. Also, you must de-install LanguageTool 0.9.5 before upgrading to OpenOffice.org 3.0.1 because of compatibility issues. A version of LanguageTool for OpenOffice.org 3.0.1 will soon be released.
LanguageTool 0.9.5 (for OpenOffice.org 3.0.0), 10 MB,
requires Java 5.0
or later. NOTE: this version currently only works with OpenOffice.org 3.0.0
and you need to restart OpenOffice.org after installation of this extension
LanguageTool 0.9.2 (for OpenOffice.org 2.x), 9 MB,
requires Java 5.0
or later. NOTE: this version does not work with OpenOffice.org 3.0
Try LanguageTool via Java WebStart:
Start LanguageTool (10 MB)
Installation and Usage:
- In OpenOffice.org: Double click LanguageTool-0.9.5.oxt to install it. If that doesn't work, call Tools -> Extension Manager -> Add... to install it. Close OpenOffice.org and re-start it. Type some text with an error (e.g. "This is an test." -- make sure the text language is set to English) and you should see a blue underline (version 0.9.5 only). For version 0.9.2, you'll need to use the "LanguageTool" entries in the "Tools" menu to check a text.
- Also see Usage for using LanguageTool outside of OpenOffice.org.
If integration into OpenOffice.org doesn't work:
- LanguageTool installation fails if the name of your user account contains special characters. The only workaround so far seems to be to use a different user account. (Issue 95162)
- Opening the spell checking dialog with grammar checking enabled and with a text language not supported by OpenOffice.org causes a crash/freeze (Issue 95996)
- Did you restart OpenOffice.org - including the QuickStarter - after installation of LanguageTool? This is required, even if OpenOffice.org doesn't say so. (Issue 88692)
- Make sure Java 5.0 or later from Sun Microsystems is installed on your system. Java versions which are not from Sun Microsystems may not work.
- Make sure this version of Java is selected in OpenOffice.org (under Tools -> Options -> Java).
- If LanguageTool doesn't start and you see no error message, please check if the extension is enabled in the Extension manager (under Tools -> Extension Manager).
The source is available at Sourceforge via CVS
Known bugs: Please see the README
for a list of known problems.
License: LanguageTool is freely available under the
LGPL.