BONUS GIFTS

Although OpenOffice.org comes with a competent spell checker and thesaurus, it lacks a grammar module that many users would find rather useful. If you are among them, then try LanguageTool. LanguageTool might not be as powerful as the grammar checker bundled with Microsoft Office, but it has one major advantage: You can improve LanguageTool by adding new grammar rules to the grammar.xml file. For example, say you sometimes write “open sauce” instead of “open source.” Because both “open” and “sauce” are spelled correctly, the spell checker can’t catch the mistake, but LanguageTool can. All you need to do is to add the sample grammar rule to the rules/xx/grammar.xml file (where xx refers to the actual language code, such as en, de, fr, etc.).