OpenOffice's perpetually broken syntax check

I totally get it! Releasing a piece of software and bragging about it online and in one's resume is so rewarding. It nets you recognition by geeks, reviews in blogs, and lands you in a well-paying job. Consequences come later, and who cares.

I am talking about such consequences, as bugs that then appear in commercial software that the formerly open-source developers write, once they land in a real-world, paying job. The problem is that doing open-source, they cannot and do not develop a habit of thoroughly testing their software. The end results may be as benign as an annoyance for a user, or a catastrophe, such as an airplane crash or a pandemic of some virus.

Take for example the syntax check in OpenOffice developed by Apache Foundation. It works sometimes, rarely, mostly in brand-new documents, after a brand-new install of OpenOffice. As time goes by, syntax check stops working. It is not clear what is the major factor: the age of the OO installation, or the age of documents, or both, but eventually the red squigglies under the misspelled words disappear, and pressing F7 yields nothing but the confirmation "Spell check complete" even though misspelled words exist in the text.

Any attempts to get this bug resolved fall on deaf ears. A quick search for "openoffice spellcheck broken" yields 90,000 results. No resolution up to 2020. Congratulations!

Posted by: LinuxLies at 06:34 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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