A simple macro for LibreOffice to highlight errors with suggestions and links to explanations provided by the open source After the deadline (ATD) language checking service. This macro is hard-coded to use that server on localhost.

There is an unmaintained java-based LibreOffice extension which I'm sure is better than this software, but does not work with LibreOffice 5+ called atd-openoffice.

Tested in LibreOffice 5.2 and 5.3dev.

Copy the GrammarAlert.py script to your LibreOffice python scripts folder. The site varies per platform. For example, OSX and in recent nightly build:

/Applications/LibreOfficedev.app/Contents/Resources/Scripts/python/

Install and run the ATD server

The macro will appear in:

Tools > Macros > Organise Macros > Python

GrammarAlert will appear under 'LibreOffice Macros'. Run the check function to check the current document.

• Use the LibreOffice python to run the tests.

• Run ATD service on localhost.

• Run LibreOffice in server mode, listening on port 2002.

• Highlighting with non-destructive underlines like spellcheck.

• Providing suggestions in a contextual menu instead of mangling the text.

• ATD service only supports English US. ATD spelling errors not highlighted to give compatibility with other English variants.

• ATD service ignores curly quotes and reports them as errors because they are missing. There is a simple filter for them included to replace them with their ASCII equivalents. Other extended characters are likely to cause similar problems.