Apache OpenOffice (AOO) Bugzilla – Issue 88267
Document language is recognized incorrectly, keeps changing and there is no UI to set it manually
Last modified: 2008-04-15 14:21:15 UTC
I am using a Finnish edition of Writer 2.3.0 and writing a document that is entirely in American English. I have set that as the default language for the document (several times) and I have set American English as the language for many words and paragraphs that OO keeps detecting incorrectly regardless. After editing the document for a while, again OO thinks my paragraphs are some other language and underlines them in red. Again I try to manually set the language for these paragraphs and words to American English by right clicking on them, but in the menu OO gives only options for many strange languages, but not the obvious American English. Instead, it offers the option to change the word or paragraph to Slovakian, Catalan, and many other languages. When I checked the OO Help, I found that the right click menu with a single language option to change to seems to be a documented feature. I think it is a major defect. Usually this feature is needed exactly when the application is recognizing the language incorrectly. How come you cannot manually select the language to change to, but the system tries to suggest another language? How could it suggest the correct language, if it recognizes it incorrectly in the first place? Of course there should be a way to manually override. Here is what should be done: - Provide a way to manually select the language for a paragraph or word. No suggestions, just completely manual control. - Provide a UI for setting the language of the whole document and make sure it stays when set. Every day I waste anything from several minutes up to an hour wrestling with this problem. It shouldn't be this hard just to write simple text in US English.
Reassigned to SBA.
It seems the language of a paragraph changes especially when changing (or setting again the same) style for a paragraph. Looks like there is some language setting hidden in the paragraph styles. However, I cannot find any language settings in the UI when editing the style. If there is a language setting to styles, there should also be a UI for it. If styles don't have language, then changing paragraph style should not change its language. I'm not sure if this is the whole problem, but at least a part of it.
Language is set in the Font tab in the edit style dialogue (and in other dialogues). For a full description see 'languages -> selecting for text' in help. If that doesn't help to solve your problem, please revert.
Done! Dealing with language (language selection and display of language at cursor position/selection) was eased in large scale for OOo 2.4 Please see the Specification: http://specs.openoffice.org/appwide/linguistic/Set_Language_Attribute_for_Text.odt The corresponding issues were issue 1034 and issue 77208. Please upgrade to OOo 2.4. *** This issue has been marked as a duplicate of 77208 ***
Closed.