LibreOffice Writer includes features for both the home user’s short files and a publisher’s lengthy manuscripts. However, a professional writer would benefit from statistical tools to answer to such questions as: How often does each word appear? What is the average sentence length? How readable is a passage? Needing such information for a book-length manuscript, I turned to LibreOffice’s extension site, confident that among the hundreds of extensions available I would find at least one that would give me such statistics. Within seconds I had found Linguist, which was able to give me the raw data I needed, although without any filters or more than a summary in a LibreOffice file.

Linguist is installed like every other LibreOffice extension: Download the extension, open Writer |Tools | Extensions to find and add it, and Linguist will be available the next time you reboot Writer. Just be sure that you download the 1.5.1 release at the bottom of Linguist's page rather than use the Download Latest button at the top of the page, which does not do what it says. When you reboot, you will find that, unlike many extensions that add a menu item or a toolbar icon seemingly at random, Linguist adds its own easily found menu. If, like me, you are not fond of extra menus, you can leave Linguist disabled in Tools | Extension and only enable it when needed during revisions.

Linguist’s menu lists four self-explanatory items. Selecting any one generates a Writer document with its results displayed one per line. The analysis is rapid, generating results for a 400-page document in less than 20 seconds on a modern desktop system. However, you may prefer to work chapter by chapter rather than with an entire document in order to minimize the scrolling as you work.

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