Malta Linux User Group

If you've installed OpenOffice 3.1, you can now have the Maltese spell checker installed on it. Here are the step-by-step instructions (assuming OOo 3.1 is already installed).

OOo uses hunspell as its spell-checker, so the first step is to install the tools to create new word lists:

sudo apt-get install hunspell hunspell-tools recode

Next, download the latest version of the Maltese spell checker word list from here and extract the archive into a new folder. Note that aspell must be installed for the prezip command (it normally is).

tar xvjf aspell6-mt-0.4.tar.bz2
cd aspell6-mt-0.4/
prezip -d mt.cwl
wc -l mt.wl > mt.dic
cat mt.wl >> mt.dic
recode iso8859-3..utf-8 mt.dic
echo "SET UTF-8" > mt.aff
sudo cp mt.aff mt.dic /usr/share/myspell/dicts/

You can now test whether hunspell recognises the Maltese dictionary by invoking "hunspell -d mt". When the prompt appears, try entering some correct and incorrect words in Maltese. It should respond with suggestions if the word is incorrect, and an asterisk if it's correct. Finally press Ctrl-D to exit.

That's it. You can now launch OpenOffice 3.1, set the document's language to Maltese, and the spell checker should correctly spell-check your text.

Well, almost anyway. It does not seem to allow for an apostrophe or a dash being part of a word (eg. tela' or bil-), but it's still better than nothing.