Le mercredi 26 octobre 2005 à 22:32 +0200, cono a écrit : > Nicolas Mailhot wrote: > > > Le mercredi 26 octobre 2005 à 18:43 +0200, Mathias Bauer a écrit : > > [...] > > > > Now, if you use simple styles with only language attribute (to avoid > > interactions with presentation) and fixed names (to avoid reconfiguring > > OO.o every time you load a new document) wouldn't it have been so much > > easier to access language directly in the first place ? > > > Something as > - adding a character-style for every language you use to the standard > template; > - assigning the styles to a key-combination ?
That's pretty much the only kind of workaround you can do if you work at at a department-level. It won't solve the problem of SOHO and single users, and it won't solve the problems of multinationals with branches in many countries, but that's the only thing doable with the current OO.o version. And all it does is extract the info you need to set from the style structure that has been forced around it, and the style indirection means you'll have problems every time you need to work with someone who used slightly different conventions. From a pure UI POW what most users expect is a dropdown control with a language list in the toolbar (like for styles, but strictly limited to language), and a key accel to quickly switch between the languages which have already been used in the doco. Even users that want to sync presentation changes with language changes would probably be better served by some sort of conditional styling than by what we have today (ie allow to define variants on a single style based on the encoding of the text styled. And then only offer the root style in the style dropdown) But then good internationalisation is something very new and foreign to traditional closed software houses, unicode is not the natural way of working yet and OO.o shows its SO roots. When encoding restrictions made documents with a high language mix a technical impossibility, the pressure to handle languages well was not so big. I just hope someone gets thing into shape soon. That's the kind of misdesign MS would love to point out to journalists and politicians. -- Nicolas Mailhot
