Local LanguageTool With Eloquent and LibreOffice
English wasn’t my first/primary language. I attended a Kannada-medium school during my primary school years and switched to an English-medium school in high school. I caught up with it as I grew up speaking it with friends and then colleagues, as English is the primary language at work 1. Now that we are a multilingual family, it has become the language I use with my daughter and at home. What a change – it will need a different blog post!
Essentially, I need a reliable spelling and grammar checker to write well. Over the years, I have used many; in recent times, I found Grammarly, which has been good 2. However, I have always been looking for a decent FOSS alternative. That’s when I found LanguageTool, both the SAAS service and the FOSS server. The FOSS server performs basic spelling and grammar checking, which is sufficient in most cases. 3
LanguageTool is an Open Source proofreading software for English, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Polish, Dutch, and more than 20 other languages. It finds many errors that a simple spell checker cannot detect.
On Linux, I found Eloquent, which I installed from Flathub.
Eloquent is a proofreading software for English, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Polish, Dutch, and more than 20 other languages. It finds many errors that a simple spell checker cannot detect. It works fully offline, powered by LanguageTool standalone server.
In addition to using Eloquent’s UI, I also integrated it with my other applications, such as LibreOffice. This makes it easy to use, and everything happens locally.
When Eloquent starts, it also starts the LanguageTool Server locally and uses its HTTP APIs. You can test if the LanguageTool Server is running locally by going to http://localhost:8081/v2/languages. That link will show all the available languages. Once it is running, you can use the same server with other front-ends besides Eloquent.
If you are not using Eloquent or don’t want to install it, then you can start a standalone LanguageTool Server on your machine. It exposes the same set of APIs. I have used Eloquent because it’s an easy, one-step installation for non-technical users. It installs and runs both the server and a frontend app, which is Eloquent.
To use LanguageTool with LibreOffice, first, you need to configure LibreOffice to use a local server. Go to LibreOffice -> Tools –> Options. Then, follow the screenshots below.
Sometimes the LibreOffice doesn’t save your LanguageTool Remote Grammar Checker in Available Language Modules. Then shutdown the LibreOffice and reopen enable it. It should save it.
Now, you can use the LanguageTool in LibreOffice along with Eloquent. In fact, you can configure any other tool that uses the LanguageTool APIs. Now that I am using it regularly, I should be able to conclude soon which one suits me better: LanguageTool FOSS, LanguageTool SaaS, or Grammarly4.
Footnotes
- For the IT sector, It’s the primary language in India ↩
- I don’t use their browser addon or Android keyboard; I use their online editor on their website. So they get only what I give them. ↩
- That said, I have been testing both the FOSS and SaaS services, along with Grammarly. I am comparing them to check which works better for me. Yet to conclude. ↩
- I have heard about ZeroGPT’s grammar checker, but I haven’t tried it yet. ↩
This is perfect! I already found Eloquent, but quickly grew tired of copy/paste to check each of 400 pages. Integrating it in LIbreOffice works perfectly.