Languages in Impress / ODF

Christophe Strobbe wrote:

> One of the problems with OpenOffice.org Impress (and Calc) is that 
> you can't set the language of a presentation (or spreadsheet in case 
> of Calc) or spans of text inside it.

I haven't checked yet what happens when the ODF file gets exported to
other formats like PDF, .doc etc, but is actually possible to do that in
Impress using ODF.... However, it is not straightforward and buggy :(


This is due to a combination of how ODF sets languages, the UI of
OOo Impress and some bugs:

- ODF sets languages info on styles using fo:language, not directly on
the content (so no xml:lang on text:p... I've suggested to change that
in the next ODF specification after the upcoming ODF 1.2, so don't hold
your breath: http://tools.oasis-open.org/issues/browse/OFFICE-2502)

In addition, it is possible to set a "default" language, which is kept in the
meta.xml file inside the ODF packages, instead of on styles... but not
very useful in multi-language documents.

 
- It's cleaner to do in Writer, because the UI has a "Styles" menu, but
one can create (limited) styles in Calc and Impress as well, by using
Format menu / Styles.

- Not using styles, I can still do this in Impress 3.2.0 (ubuntu 10, 64bit):

1) create new presentation, and start a new slide
2) first bullet:

* Hallo Bonjour

3) select the word Hallo, right-click, select "Character" and set the
Font language to Dutch
4) repeat for Bonjour, but set the Font language to French 

Often Impress seems to "forget" the last language set when using
several languages on the same line, so it may be necessary to resort
to tricks like inserting a dummy whitespace and change that language,
and/or just keep trying till it sticks...
Have to investigate when exactly it happens, and if it is reproducible
consistently across different versions and platforms.

Note that most OOo packages provided by Linux distributions are not
Oracle's stock OOo, but patched versions (Novell's Go-OO or similar).
YMMV, although I don't think it matters in this case, but the products
derived from OOo's codebase like Symphony, EuroOffice may yield
different results...


Best regards

Bart

Received on Friday, 13 August 2010 21:03:42 UTC