Apache OpenOffice (AOO) Bugzilla – Issue 69451
Inconsistency with spell checking option "check in all languages" between Writer and Calc
Last modified: 2013-08-07 14:43:11 UTC
When the option "check in all languages" is enabled Writer will only check words whose language attribute is one of the languages that can be spell checked, and then check this word in all for spell check available languages. That will result in the following: if for example no Danish or Chinese spell checker is available text formatted with Danish or Chinese will never get spelled. Neither with automatic spell checking nor with interactive spell checking, and thus effectively the text is being prevented from getting marked red, even though "check in all languages" is activated and the text is likely not be proven to be correct by any spell checker. Conversely in Draw/Impress/Calc will check in all available language disregarding the language attribute of the word. Thus a Danish or Chinese text is most likely to be not known by all installed spellcheckers and thus it will be marked red and found with interactive spell checking. The only way to prevent this would be to install a spell checker for that language, which is not always possible, or to change the language attribute to 'none'. Becasue of this different behavior a decision is needed which way it should be. Is it to be like in Draw/Impress/Calc as the help text for that option suggests. (This one can be easily fixed.) Or is it to be as in Writer (can almost as easily be fixed) but probably needs additional changes in Help and maybe UI if that Option is to be named differently.
TL->FL: Please decide which way you want it to be and then hand it back to me.
FL->TL: I think we should do what the option says and what Draw/Impres/Calc already do. We should disregard the language setting of the text and check with all spell checkers. We have to test, if this change has a performance impact.
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SBA->TL: As discussed: Before making a decision here, I would like to get further User Experience input about this. As far as I understand the "Chacke in all languages" box, it was (roughly spoken) "for the Users who do not set language attributes correctly, but want a hint "is this correct in SOME language?" After the implementation of the language statusbar control (in OOo 2.4), Setting the language became much, much easier. So my questions are: - Do we need the "Check in all languages" option any longer? - What is it used for "in real life"? - Does the langstatusbar feature affect these users? I put myself and FL on cc.
Calc/Draw/Impress do not offer the language control in the statusbar today. So I propose to "fix" the behavior in Writer and allign it to the behavior present in Draw/Impress/Calc today.
target 3.1
This issue is solved by having removed that option in OOo 3.0.1. See spec for grammar checking.
Closing.
Is there a rationale why the Check in all languages has been removed?
tl->hagar_de_lest: a) For once it was long since a odd functionality that nobody remembered anymore why it was introduced. Someone once made a plausible guess but since the reasoning did not apply anymore at that time already I don't remember it anymore. b) Much more crucial however is that "spelling in all languages" is actually a very bad idea with grammar checking. A good grammar checker needs to rely on the analysis of the sentence thus e.g. it needs to identify verbs, nouns, object, subject etc. And if the spelling errors are not fixed first the grammar checker can not properly do those tasks (the severity of this might differ from language to language though). That's also the reasoning why the dialog always displays the spelling errors first and only after those the grammar errors. If you would now have a French word in an English sentence the grammar checker can not make sense of it, and if by "spelling in all languages" enabled that French word is not marked as incorrect by the English spell checker because it is known by the French spell checker then it may happen that some grammar error may slip through unnoticed because the grammar checker can not find it with that misspelled word. And that would contradict the whole idea/effort put into grammar checking.
Thanks! That makes sense, indeed.
Most texts I write are in german, citing english sources. Most of the sources are OCR-products from scans. Spell check is much more important for me than grammar check. Why don't you let the user choose? Enabling either grammar or multi-language spell-check?
tl->el_schwalmo: I see your point. And please believe me that I don't want to teach you. But let me ask you in return isn't it somewhat unreliable to spell check a mixed German English document that way? For example if just by error you have the German text like "Das tier war entlaufen." and use it in your document then you will never find the spelling error for 'tier' which should have been uppercase because 'tier' is a correct English term. And I believe other such examples can be found the other way around as well. If on the other hand the text was set to German and 'check in all languages' disabled then the spell checker should be able to find the problem. Because of the above I think if you want the best result from spell checking one should always attribute the text with its correct language. Still I understand that 'check in all languages' might have been an attractive option. Let me think a bit about possible workarounds...
Many people need to write documents with words in more than a language, so without the option to "check in all languages" it would need to check the documents many times. With "check in all languages" on, it is possible to check the all document in just one first look... looking for underlined words... In this point of view grammar checker is less useful than the spell checker ... That would be very useful to have the option to choose, may be in the tool-bar of Ooo... May be it could be possible to automatically disable "check in all languages" if the "grammar checking" is enabled. Thanx for thinking about a possible workarounds :)
tl->easyw: No, no default off-switching of options. Especailly since spell checking and grammar checking are still two processes that do not know about the other and just having a grammar checker for a single language would already require the spell-in-all-languages to be disabled. I think the best solution for this is now to write a Java based Spell-In-All-Languages spell checker extension. By doing this the user can disbale or enable that extension in the extension manager. And more in the "Writing Aids" it would be possible to disable that spell checker as well. There it could even be done on a per language base. That is one could state 'check-in-all-languages' but don't use that checker for e.g. French. And the great plus would be that no additional UI would be requited everything is already there! It just gets activated/deactivated in a different way then before. Also the implementation should be fairly simply since one just needs to implement a loop that iterates of all languages and to call the respective spell checklers for those. The problem however is that I currently have no time and am not yet familiar with Java. :-( For someone with the appropriate skills (Java and creating extensions) it should be doable in about a day...
I'd like to ask if there has been any progress on this issue? i'd like to stress, that the current situation is mostly unworkable, especially for people who have to use several languages in one document. I am currently writing my diploma thesis and the missing "check all languages" option is really retarding. In some sentences these new settings means to me, that I have to change the language settings three or four times, what is really frustrating sometimes. I hope that somebody can provide a solution to this problem, which affects a lot of users, soon.