On 14/04/2008, S & H Manterys <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > I am evaluating Open Office for suitability in my non-profit small library > catalogue. > I have Microsoft Windows XP 2000, with Microsoft Proofing Tools for input > of non-english spelling. > Does Open Office database cater for non-english spelling, and how? > Thank you > Stan Manterys >
OpenOffice handles spell checking using a combination of dictionaries and "styles". The first step is to download and install the dictionaries you need. This is done via a Wizard. You can now set up a "default language" which will be used for spell checking if you say nothing else. You can change the default language at any time. You can also change it temporarily for "this" document. So, for example, if you normally write in French, you would probably set your default language to French. But if you want to write a document in German, just change to German "for this document only". The setting will be remembered with the document. New documents will continue to use the default French. You could also have different templates for different languages if you prefer that mechanism. If you want to write multi-lingual documents you can tell OpenOffice to use a different langauge for each paragraph or even for each word using "styles". This subject is too complex to for a simple e-mail but is fully documented in the free OpenOffice documentation available from the OpenOffice web site <www.openoffice.org>. Basically you establish a "style" for each language and then set (1 or 2 clicks) the appropriate style as necessary. OpenOffice uses the language of the style to do spell checking. If you do this sort of thing a lot you could set up templates containing definitions of the appropriate styles. OpenOffice also makes provision for the use and spell checking of non-Western alphabets such as Urdu, Hebrew, Esperanto etc. and for languages like Hebrew which are written right-to-left. Again all this is fully documented in the free user guides downloadable from the web site. There are also books available for purchase. Of course, all this assumes (a) you have the relevant dictionaries installed and (b) you have a means of entering the appropriate foreign characters - Russian keyboard for example. All these mechanisms are built into OpenOffice. No separate "proofing tools" are required. And of course, OpenOffice is free, as is the documentation and support :-) Hope this helps. -- Harold Fuchs London, England Please reply *only* to users@openoffice.org
