LibreOffice is a powerful office suite; its clean interface and powerful tools
let you unleash your creativity and grow your productivity. LibreOffice embeds
several applications that make it the most powerful Free & Open Source Office
suite on the market: Writer, the word processor, Calc, the spreadsheet
application, Impress, the presentation engine, Draw, our drawing and
flowcharting application, Base, our database and database frontend,
and Math for editing mathematics.
This SlackBuild builds the entire project from its source code. In seeking a
fully functional LibreOffice, most optional features are included by default,
using internal versions of any external software components that may be needed.
This results in a very small number of directly required additional software
packages.
However most of this additional software is also available as SBo SlackBuilds.
During configuration, the LibreOffice SlackBuild will detect any such packages
that are already installed and use them in preference to building its own
internal versions. Packages from SBo that will be use in this way are:
CoinMP cppunit glm libabw libcdr libcmis libe-book libeot libepubgen
libexttextcat libfreehand libmspub libmwaw libnumbertext liborcus
libpagemaker libqxp libnumbertext libstaroffice libtommath libwps libzmf
lpsolve mythes postgresql qt5 valgrind ucpp unixODBC avahi
libetonyek xmlsec
Remember, these packages are not essential but entirely optional. If not found,
LibreOffice will simply build its own internal versions.
Also keep in mind that any package from the above list which is detected and
used when building LibreOffice will most likely become a runtime dependency too
e.g. if avahi is detected and used at build time, it will also need to be
installed at run time.
Build time environment variables that may be set to vary features are as follows:
1. support additional languages by overriding the LOLANGS variable, whose
default setting is LOLANGS="de es fr id it ja nl vi zh-CN". Note that en-US
is always added to whatever LOLANGS is set. Thus building with, for example,
LOLANGS="de" sh LibreOffice.SlackBuild
would build LibreOffice with support for german and US english languages.
Additionally, setting LOLANGS="ALL" will build in support for all available
languages.
2. A number of Java Development Kits are suitable for building LibreOffice.
At the moment (since, at least, LO version 7.0.0.3) the default JDK is the
latest LTS release, jdk11. Other JDK's supported by the SlackBuild are jdk12,
jdk13, jdk14 & jdk15 but these non-default JDK's must be explicitly specified
when running the SlackBuild using the JAVA environment variable e.g.
JAVA=jdk15 sh LibreOffice.SlackBuild
It is also possible to build LibreOffice without any JAVA support (with
somewhat reduced capability in LO Base) by running:
JAVA=no sh LibreOffice.SlackBuild
3. The number of parallel make jobs used by the LibreOffice build system defaults
to the number of available cpu cores. If the MAKEFLAGS environment variable
contains the -j option e.g.
MAKEFLAGS=-j6
then the SlackBuild will pass this to the LibreOffice build system
(via its --with-parallelism configure option). The number of parallel make jobs
is further controlled with the PARALLEL environment varaiable e.g.
PARALLEL=1 sh LibreOffice.SlackBuild
which would limit building to a single make process, overriding any value set
with the -j option in MAKEFLAGS.
4. Use of ccache during building is turned off by default to save disk space (and
possible build failure due to lack of disk space). It may be reinstated by
setting the USE_CCACHE environment to "yes" e.g.
USE_CCACHE=yes sh LibreOffice.SlackBuild
For performance reasons, this Slackbuild sets GTK2 to be used at runtime.
Alternatives (gen, gtk3, kde4) may still be used by setting SAL_USE_VCLPLUGIN
in the user's runtime environment.
Spell checking of documents at runtime requires installation of a suitable
wordlist for the language concerned. This can be achieved in either of two
ways:
1. Build & install hunspell-en (or hunspell-es, hunspell-pl) from SBo
2. Search for the desired language dictionary at:
http://extensions.libreoffice.org/extension-center?getCategories=Dictionary
and download the relevant file e.g. dict-en.oxt. Now open LO's extension
manager and press the "Add..." button which will open a file browser with which
to locate and open the downloaded .oxt file. The new dictionary will now appear
in the Extension Manager.
Some people have experienced difficulties building LibreOffice while a previoius
version is still installed. It is therefore recommended that any previous
version should be removed before building LibreOffice. As well as removing any
LibreOffice installation, it is important to also clear environment variables
that were set by the installation i.e.
/sbin/removepkg LibreOffice
unset UNO_PATH
unset URE_BOOTSTRAP
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