I downloaded the "freeoffice.tgz" file and unpacked it to /mnt/home/freeoffice/. The reason for this is that I have a number of Puppy Linux distributions installed and I would like to use freeoffice in all of them, which requires only an installation to the hard disk and a few appropriate symbolic links.
The first time I started Textmaker, it created two folders: /.softmaker and /root/SoftMaker. Since large directories in root fill up the pupsave file, I moved the folders to /mnt/home/freeoffice and created symbolic links back to the expected locations. I installed the German templates next to English (US) templates and erased a lot of localization files that I would never need. (I was careful not to erase anything with "de" in it.) I created a desktop link for Textmaker and everything worked perfectly - except for a peculiar error in the German spell checker.
The German spell checker rejects all words containing one of the German special characters (umlaut ä, ö, ü, etc. and ß), but otherwise seems to operate correctly, even underlining old spellings like "daß" in blue.
Planmaker and Presentations also worked perfectly when launched from the command line, but with the same spell-checker problem.
Insofar as I can offer an clue to the solution of the problem, it seems to me that freeofficeand hunspell are not on the same (code) page, but I have no idea where to change the necessary setting.
SoftMaker Support could not duplicate the problem or suggest a solution.
Further experimentation revealed that this problem does not affect all Puppies.
The spell checker works properly with the following:
Puppy Lucid 5.28 (2.6.33.2)
Slacko Puppy 5.3.2.7 (3.1.10)
Wary Puppy 5.3.90 (2.6.32.59)
I have not tried this with other localizations that use characters beyond the original ASCII 128, Clearly, this would be a problem for adopting Textmaker as a replacement for abiword, which I would, otherwise, heartily recommend.The spell-checker error appears with:
PuppyPrecise 5.4 (3.2.29)
Slacko Puppy 5.3.6.5 (3.4.14)
Anyone have a suggestion?