Helge Hafting wrote:
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 guess this is the crux of our disagreement... As you yourself said,
it'll never happen that one types anything in Hebrew and only later
realizes that he's been typing in English, it's just not possible. But
what does often happen is that you start typing a mixture of English and
Hebrew, and then at some point realize that this should really be a
Hebrew document, so you switch the language of the document, but you
certainly don't expect all existing English paragraphs to become Hebrew...
In that case, I don't dispute the validity of this bug report. But I do
want to clarify that when it is fixed, care should be taken not to
change the behavior regarding RTL languages. I'll add a note to this
effect to the bug report.
Ideally, I guess the determination of whether or not to preserve the
language of "default" text when switching the document language from A
to B should be something like this: if A and B have the same alphabet
(which I don't think we can check --- but what about if we would use the
encoding as a surrogate --- would that work for you?) then all "default
language" text should remain "default", i.e., it is now considered to be
in language B. However, if B has a different alphabet (encoding) than A,
then all text marked as "default" should now be explicitly marked as A.
Does that sound right?
Note, however, that this could be very confusing, because sometimes the
language will change, and other times it won't, and the user may not
understand why it is or isn't in any specific case...
Dov
