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 vlc 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. enable the experimental VLC avmedia backend (disabled by default) with: VLC="yes" This requires the vlc package (available from SBo) to be installed. 3. disable kde4 support (enabled by default) with: KDE4="no" 4. 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 would build LibreOffice with support for german and US english languages. Additionally, setting LOLANGS="ALL" will build in support for all available languages. 5. A number of Java Development Kits are suitable for building LibreOffice. The default JDK for this SlackBuild is openjdk7. Others may be chosen by setting the JAVA environment variable when running the SlackBuild. Recognised values are openjdk7 (the default, not explicitly required), openjdk8 and jdk e.g. JAVA=jdk (to use SBo jdk package with Oracle binary version). Using an alternate JDK will require presence of the appropriate package when building LibreOffice. Since the apache-ant package is already required by openjdk7, hence openjdk8, its listing in the REQUIRES field is redundant in these cases. However it remains listed to accomodate the case of JAVA=jdk, in which the apache-ant package is needed to build LibreOffice. Finally, setting JAVA=no will build LibreOffice without any Java support. 6. 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. 7. 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 is removed while building LibreOffice.