On Wed, 2004-01-14 at 18:47, Helen Faulkner wrote: > > OK, but please answer both questions. Is there a tick mark? > > Sorry - I thought you meant the same thing both times. > > The answer is yes to both questions. Yes the language was set to > ENglish (UK) the time I looked, and also in the options default setting. > And yes, there is a tick mark next to that language in the list (it's > the only one with a tick mark in that list).
OK. That means, the dictionary is correctly installed and OOo has found it. > But I have noticed the > program is acting more strangely than I initally thought. Maybe the > problem is to do with how the program remembers the user options. It seems to be a problem with your understanding of how the language setting works. > Here's an example run: > > 1 open test.doc (attached) with openoffice.org writer. > 2 right-click in text field -> character. Language setting is > English(Australia) > 3 tools -> spellcheck -> check. Incorrect behaviour where it says > spellcheck is complete without having noticably done anything, or > identified wrongly spelled word, or told me that I don't have the right > dictionary Correct behaviour. Spellcheck is only carried out for those languages where you have a dictionary installed. Imagine you are working on a document which is mostly in English but has several sections in a language that you do not have the dictionary installed for. If OOo popped up a message every time for those sections that did not have a dictionary installed, you would get pretty sick of it. So it just skips those sections which are in a language that it can't check. > 4 right-click in text field -> character. Change language setting to > English (UK). > 5 tools -> spellcheck -> check. Same incorrect behaviour. Wrong conclusion. And I think this is your problem. The Language setting is in the Character format dialog for a very good reason. It is a character attribute, not a global setting. It behaves in exactly the same way as any other character attribute, such as Bold, Italic and Underline. If you click on the Bold button without having marked text, nothing will change because OOo expects you to type in new text, which will be marked as bold. In the same way, if you change the language without having selected any text, nothing will happen. Therefore if you want to change the language of your whole document, you must choose 'Select All' before making your change. Otherwise nothing will happen. [snip] > So I'm observing the following behaviours: > > 1) The language setting doesn't stay set to what you change it to, > necessarily. Because it is a character attribute not a global setting - you must have selected something, or type something new after the change. > 2) When an unavailable language is set, there usually isn't a message > saying that dictionary isn't there (I did see such a message a couple of > times, but not mostly) The reason being, it can get very annoying for someone editing documents in multiple languages. > 3) When an available language is set, the spellcheck sometimes works > and sometimes doesn't work at all. 4) The default language setting in the options dialog sometimes changes > without apparent cause. See 1. > I'll attach the file I was using in the above, but I won't be suprised > if you can't reproduce this behaviour, seeing as it's acting so > erratically on me. If I mark all the text and change the language, all is ok. Chris