I needed to use LibreOffice today. It's not something that happens very often. I almost always write or edit in a text editor, web form or Google Docs. But today I opened up LibreOffice.

I wanted to use "automatic" spell-checking in LibreOffice, which you invoke with shift-F7. But it didn't work.

I looked at my default "language," which was U.S. English. There was no little blue check next to it that indicated it had a dictionary. I checked my packages. I wasn't missing English.

It turns out there's a hack that gets spell-checking working and gives me the red squiggly lines under my misspelled words (that's the way I like to do it.

I found the answer in LibreOffice's "Ask LibreOffice" forum (which uses the same software as Ask Fedora).

Here is the fix from that helpful post:

Under Tools -> Options -> Language Settings: Writing Aids, the list of available language modules showed almost everything set. I unchecked and then re-checked "Hunspell SpellChecker" and "Libhyphen Hyphenator" and hit OK. (I strongly suspect that the hunspell was the significant checkbox). Then, when I go back to Language and look at the default language settings, the "English (USA)" entry has the ABC✔ by it, and now spell checking is working.

Best guess is that some results of invoking something from hunspell is saved by libreoffice and that with updating versions, the cached output is no longer valid. Re-invoking (when re-checking the checkbox) refreshes the cached data and now everything is all better.

It sure worked for me.

I stopped using PDF-Shuffler for awhile. I reinstalled it in Debian a few days ago and have been using it a lot. LibreOffice Draw can't do everything.

I had to generate a report today, one that included a bunch of PDF documents, and I finally figured out how to import PDFs into LibreOffice (with the help of LO's PDF Import extension, which still appears to have Oracle's fingerprints all over it, by the way).

Call it counterintuitive, but once you bring a PDF into LibreOffice, you edit it in LibreOffice Draw.

It's amazing. You can modify the text in the PDFs, move them around, bring in additional images, create text boxes and fill them.

Then you can export the whole thing as a multi-page PDF. Did that. Looks great.

Like the title says, LibreOffice Draw is my new favorite application. This week anyway.