Dov Feldstern wrote:
Helge Hafting wrote:
Paul Smith wrote:
Thanks, Steve. If it is not a bug, then many users like me -- I guess
-- would be very happy if they were given the option of choosing as
global the change of language, i.e., affecting all paragraphs and not
only the the new ones.
Such an option already exists: select whatever you want to change ---
the entire document, if that's what you want --- and then set the
language from "Edit->Text Style->Customized",
Exactly what users don't want. First - this can be lots of work if you
have many pages to change with lots of little foreign snippets inbetween
that you don't want to change. (quoutes, tech terms and so on in a
different language.)
Second, starting to write a document with the wrong language is common
for people who work with several languages. You don't notice the wrong
language at all if both languages uses the same writing system, which is
the case for the many european languages that work with latin1.
You don't see it until you run the final spellcheck, or notice weird
hyphenation when doing view->dvi.
or using the "language xxx" lfun from the minibuffer. Switching the
language of a document may have other effects, such as determining
language-dependent document-wide settings, as well as determine the
"default" language when you start typing, but it would seem very
strange to me if it also change the language of already typed in text.
Not strange at all. Document text that isn't explicitly set to some
language, is in the "document language" and changes if that
language is ever changed. This is very convenient.
I can see that this will be different with languages that uses
different writing systems, such as english and hebrew. Changing one
to another might be meaningless with no common letters.
But then, anyone wanting to type hebrew will notice right away that
their new document is set to english.
I think this is a bug, in the "paste" mechanism.
You can change the language of all paragraphs
(except those with an exlicit foreign language) by changing the
document language. But this only works if you _wrote_ the document
that way. If you _pasted_ as little as a single word from a document
with another language, then this screws up. (_Writing_ that
foreign word and using edit->text style to mark it foreign will
work - you can still change the document language and have
everything else change with it.)
This is very strange --- I see the behavior you're describing with
regard to, say, English and French, but not (thank goodness) with
regard to English and Hebrew: In other words, when I have typed (or
pasted) in something in English, and the switch the document language
to Hebrew, then what's already been typed or pasted in remains in
English, as I would expect.
The behavior that's occurring with English and French seems very
strange to me, what I would expect is for all text that's already been
typed in to remain in its original language. If the user explicitly
wants to switch the language of text that's already been typed in, it
can be done as explained above.
It can, but the concept of text having the "document language" is
nice, and it sure helps when correcting mistakes. Consider writing a french
article, containing lots of quotes in various other languages. Then
the spellchecker comes up with english because the document language
was at its (mistaken) default. Changing the document language then
fixes everything - the main text is now french. People working with
several european languages are common - the default language will be
the one they uses most, and sometimes they will forget to set
the correct language from the start.
Helge Hafting
