Niels Horn's Blog

LibreOffice Language Packs

October 25th, 2010 by Niels Horn in LibreOffice, Slackware

LibreOffice

So you installed one of the beta versions of LibreOffice and it seems to work fine. But you had OpenOffice.org running in your local language and can't get used to "File", "Tools", etc. menus and want them back in your own language you got used to after all these years.

Language Packs

The Document Foundation does not offer localized versions like OOo did, instead they offer a single version per operating system / architecture, with a standard US-English interface and (as of the beginning of October) "Language Packs" to localize the user interface, help files, etc.
These Language Packs come in several forms, and for Linux there is a choice between "DEB" and "RPM" packages, both for 32- & 64-bits. The RPM's actually contain several other RPM's for the different modules of LibreOffice.

On Slackware

To make everything "manageable" I created a SlackBuild script to transform the RPM Language Pack into a Slackware package that can be easily installed, upgraded or removed with the standard package tools.
This script can be downloaded here and is used as follows:

• open a shell as root: $ su -
• untar the tarball with the script: # tar xf libreoffice-langpack.tar.gz
• go to the directory with the script: # cd libreoffice-langpack
• download your language pack in this directory, from here (32-bits) or here (64-bits)
• run the script for your language: # LOLANG=<your_language_code> ./libreoffice-langpack.SlackBuild ([1] [2])
• install the created package: # installpkg /tmp/libreoffice-langpack-3.3.0_beta2_<your_language_code>* ([1])

Note [1]
Substitute <your_language_code> with the code of the language pack you downloaded, like pt_BR, nl, etc.
Note [2]
This script builds a package for LibreOffice installed in /opt/libreoffice3, like my packages do, as they are repackaged binaries. If you use LibreOffice compiled from source with AlienBob's SlackBuild, or one of his packages, LibreOffice will be installed in /usr/lib{,64}/libreoffice/ In this case, start the script with a special variable:
# LOLANG=<your_language_code> ALIEN=yes ./libreoffice-langpack.SlackBuild
and the package will be prepared for installation in /usr/lib….

Pre-built packages

There are many language codes and I cannot build packages for all of them, but I selected three I use most: en-GB ("British English"), pt-BR ("Brazilian Portuguese") and nl ("Dutch").
These can be downloaded from my site.