Checklist in Case of Problems

• LibreOffice 3.5 comes with its own integrated grammar checker (LightProof) which seems to disable LanguageTool for English and Russian. Use Options -> Language Settings -> Writing aids -> Edit... to disable LightProof and enable LanguageTool for the language you are working with to make LanguageTool work.
• Did you restart LibreOffice/OpenOffice.org - including the QuickStarter - after installation of LanguageTool? This is required, even though there is no dialog saying so. (#46279, #88692)
• Make sure Java 6.0 or later from Oracle/Sun is installed on your system. Java versions which are not from Oracle/Sun 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).

Common problems with OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice integration

• Freeze on startup: for some people, LanguageTool freezes LibreOffice or OpenOffice.org on startup for seconds to minutes. We have found the cause in LibreOffice/OpenOffice.org and are working on a fix now (May 2012). Bug report. The freeze is worse with Java 7, so we recommend Java 6 for now.
• When you get a long error message with "NoClassDefFoundError" during installation on Ubuntu like this, you might need to install the libreoffice-java-common or openoffice.org-java-common package. See this blog posting for details.
• If you get "This media-type is not supported: application/vnd.sun.star.package-bundle2.0.00" during installation, please consider resetting your OpenOffice user profile.
• If you get "Could not create Java implementation loader", try this: Got to Tools -> Options -> Java, uncheck "Use a Java runtime environment", exit OpenOffice.org and start it again, check "Use a Java runtime environment" again and try to install/activate the LanguageTool extension (source) - please let us know if this worked for you
• If you get Failed to load rules for language ... Caused by java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: Loading rules failed: Duplicate class definition: For some reason LanguageTool is installed twice as an extension in OpenOffice.org. You can try deleting the directories listed in the error message after making a backup. (The directories to be deleted have random names like "EE31.tmp_" or similar - exit OpenOffice.org before deleting anything).
• The menu items in LibreOffice/OpenOffice.org get mixed up when both After the Deadline and LanguageTool are installed. The macro mentioned here might help you. This issue is tracked as ticket #215 at After the Deadline.
• If you are using an older version of LanguageTool and/or OpenOffice.org, these issues may affect you:
  • 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. (#95162)
  • If you get a message "Can not activate the factory for com.sun.star.help.HelpIndexer because java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: org/apache/lucene/analysis/cjk/CJKAnalyzer": this was a bug In OpenOffice.org 3.1, it was fixed in version 3.2 (#98680)
  • If you get "Failed to load rules for language English" when opening the configuration dialog, try the latest version of LanguageTool, as this should be fixed in 1.3 (problem occurred on openSUSE 11.3 with LanguageTool 1.2 pre-installed)
  • LanguageTool didn't work together with the DeltaXML ODT Compare extension - use version 1.2.0 of DeltaXML ODT Compare, which fixes the problem.

Known Limitations

• Some errors are not detected: LanguageTool uses rules to detect errors, i.e. it will only complain about errors for which there is a rule that detects it. Please consider learning how to write rules and help make LanguageTool better by contributing your rules.
• Some rules that work across sentences don't work in OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice. This also affects the rule that checks whether three sentences start with the same word.
• For some rules there are a lot of false alarms, i.e., LanguageTool complains about text which is actually correct
• LanguageTool doesn't work correctly with documents that contain revisions (LibreOffice #36540, #92013)

Still need Help?

If LanguageTool still doesn't work properly for you, please post to the forum describing the problem and letting us know which version of LanguageTool, LibreOffice/OpenOffice.org and which operating system you are using.

Page last modified: 2012-05-16