Apache OpenOffice (AOO) Bugzilla – Issue 91552
Input language detection leads to unwanted text language switch
Last modified: 2013-08-07 14:43:03 UTC
With Enhancement issue 1035 ("language setting for typed text should be set to current input locale (keyboard setting)"), some users face problem when editing text while having the "wrong" keyboard layout active. One example: When correcting and editing text, even single letters get "the wrong language" (language is a character attribute), resulting in words that do not get spelled ever again. So it is strongly desired to have a UI option to switch this behavior off. The default setting may be negotiated :-)
Adjusting summary.
*** Issue 91868 has been marked as a duplicate of this issue. ***
@MBA: First, I totally recognize the need of issue 1035 but it completely breaks the user experience for other scenarios. My case: I translate a German text into French. My environment is: - OS: Win Xp German - Input locale: German My document has two main paragraph styles: "Default" (set to German) and "FR" (set to French). Now, when I type a text in French using style "FR", quite every word is marked as wrong because the keyboard locale (German) overrides the paragraph settings (French). This is a hell! The feature may be good for people switching between very different scripts like DE->RU or EN->CN but working between languages inside the same script is completely broken! People working in the same script don't switch their keyboard language! So please make an option (under "Tools - Options - Language Settings - Languages"?) saying "Apply keyboard language to typed text" and set it OFF by default! Thanx!
We could apply a small fix so that the language overwrite only is done for greek and cyrillic (not sure about turkish). What about that? Should we do that for 3.0? It would require to just remove a simple condition that currently checks whether the text language is English.
SBA->MBA: I believe we should do that for 3.0 to avoid further problems without UI for this. The "several languages without swithching keyboard" scenario is another real one. :-) Instead of making this (feature-) issue mutate, we should regard the current behavior as a show-stopping defect. So please write a new issue to get this done ASAP, thx. Put ES on CC.
cc'ing mh
I also consider this as a severe defect and not a feature, set 3.0 target.
SBA: Adjusted the summary to match the issue type "defect".
The fix is that the input locale only controls the language of the text if it was explicitly set while OOo Writer is running or if the input locale and the OOo text language attribute match the condition that either of them is using cyrillic or greek script (both not both or none of them!). So if OOo Language is Greek and the input locale is English, the OOo Languagee will be changed to English. If the OOo Language is German and the input locale is Russian, the OOo Language will be set to Russian. If the OOoLanguage is French and the input locale is English (or vice versa) nothing will be changed.
please verify
Verified in CWS languageswitchfix
For non-Latin languages the new behavior of OOo 3.0 (the input locale has priority, and not the OOo language) is comprehensible. But when you use for example English (US) as input language and write a text in English (British), which has in parts a different orthography, there is the problem that OOo switches automatically to English (US) and you can use the British orthography- corrector of OOo only by annoying manual edition of the text. It concerns probably also different variations of French and so on. I hope there will be a possibility in the next versions to disable this feature.
Verified in OOo-dev 3.2.0 DEV300m44 (PC, Windows XP English). I created two paragraphs of document. First one is in Englich. Default language setting for document- English, for keyboard - English. The second one in German. Keyboard- German. Default language setting for document- English. It change by itself from English to German if for keyboard set German. When I type German words in paragraph that set for English text (I don't change language to German) these words are marked as wrong. But when I type German text in the second paragraph, no word in German is marked as wrong.
*** Issue 94008 has been marked as a duplicate of this issue. ***
This issue is closed automatically and wasn't rechecked in a current version of OOo. The fixed issue should be integrated in OOo since more than half a year. If you think this issue isn't fixed in a current version (OOo 3.1), please reopen it and change the field 'Target Milestone' accordingly. If you want to download a current version of OOo => http://download.openoffice.org/index.html If you want to know more about the handling of fixed/verified issues => http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Handle_fixed_verified_issues
I don't think this was resolved properly unless my problem is a different issue. On XP i had my Regional and Language keyboard settings as: English (New Zealand) Keyboard: US [Default] English (United States) Keyboard: US And it ALWAYS defaulted back to US English. This has driven me nuts for six months! I think I have solved the problem by removing the English (United States) "installed service". All OO settings (locale, document default, style ...) were NZ and it is counter intuitive that the keyboard overrides this. Very frustrating. Or worse, in my case overrides this with the wrong setting apparently because I had two languages associated to US keyboards. Has anyone else experienced this?
Actually I think I should highlight what the real issue for me was. The issue was that it took me six months to understand that the XP setting was overriding OO. A simple line saying OO would read the current XP language in the dialogue box Options > Language Settings > Languages that would have pointed me in the right direction! Or a checkbox to control this behavour. Would this be hard to include in the next release? I will never know why it thought US was the default.
It's the same problem for me in OOo 3.1.1. Often it's not wanted, that OOo follows the current input locale (keyboard setting) of the operating system (Windows). Often I as a German user write English texts. But it's not easy for me using the English keyboard layout, because characters like 'z' and 'y' are on the inverse position compared to German keyboard layout. So I would prefer the German keyboard layout, but however I want to define the language in an OOo-Document as English in order to use English spell checking. But because OOo follows the OS, every time the language definition jumps back to German and I have to redefine it for every new text. - Just a stupid behaviour! So I totally agree with es: "So please make an option (under "Tools - Options - Language Settings - Languages"?) saying "Apply keyboard language to typed text" and set it OFF by default! The issue should be reopened or lead to new one... I would be very thankful!
See also similar new issue 100762!