LanguageTool
Open Source language checker
An Open Source language checker for English, French, German, Polish, Dutch, Romanian, 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.
Update 2009-11-01: Released version 1.0.0. Changes include:
- Support for Danish, Catalan, and Galician
- Rule and dictionary fixes for Dutch, French, Italian, Polish, Spanish, Swedish, and Russian
- More rules for Dutch, Polish, Russian, Spanish, Slovenian, and English
- Several bug fixes
For a more detailed list of changes, see
the Changelog.
News 2009-10-04: The LanguageTool maintainers will be giving a workshop
about extending LanguageTool at the 
OpenOffice.org Conference (OOoCon 2009) in Italy on 2009-11-06.
See the workshop page for more details.
This version works only with OpenOffice.org 3.0.1, 3.1, or later, NOT with 3.0.0. Also, you must de-install LanguageTool 0.9.5 before upgrading to OpenOffice.org 3.0.1 because of compatibility issues (check this page if you forgot to do so).
LanguageTool 1.0.0 (for OpenOffice.org 3.0.1 and 3.1), 17 MB,
requires Java 5.0
or later. NOTE: this version only works with OpenOffice.org 3.0.1 or later
and you need to restart OpenOffice.org after installation of this extension
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 (check this page if you forgot to do so).
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
Try LanguageTool via Java WebStart: (requires Java 1.6_04 or later)
Start LanguageTool (17 MB)
Installation and Usage:
- In OpenOffice.org: Double click LanguageTool-1.0.0.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.
- 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)
- 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).
- On Ubuntu, when you get an error message during installation, you might need to install the openoffice.org-java-common package. See this blog posting for details.
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.