https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=39971
Shriramana Sharma <[email protected]> changed: What |Removed |Added ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Version|4.0.0.0.alpha0+ Master |(See in Summary) --- Comment #12 from Shriramana Sharma <[email protected]> --- [By error, the first few lines of this post was included as a separate comment. Sorry for that.] Looks like I myself had formerly reported this against OOo 2.4.0 (https://issues.apache.org/ooo/show_bug.cgi?id=87484) and they just closed it as "IRREPRODUCIBLE" -- I suppose that means something like "WORKSFORME". Now I don't care to follow-up the bug on the OOo tracker -- it's LibO for me all the way. So I'll just clarify the bug here. If you have some text, Format Menu or right click > Character > Font > Language should give you the language tag to apply to the text. Currently, in this combobox, Indian languages are not mentioned. Note that this also applies to Styles and Formatting > Default Style (or any style) > Right-click > Modify > Font > Language. While Tools > Language > For Selection/Paragraph/All Text seems to list some known languages corresponding to the script of the selected text, if the required language is not visible in this and we click More, from "For Selection/Paragraph" we are taken to the same Font dialog which again does not provide the Indian languages. OTOH from "For All Text" we are taken to the Tools > Options > Language Settings > Languages where we are apparently allowed to select the "Default language for documents". Under this there are three comboboxes -- Western, "Asian" and "CTL". I am not sure what is the rationale between the separation of "Asian" vs "CTL" -- both Asian and non-Asian scripts require CTL IIUC. And the Asian and CTL comboboxes are disabled in the absence of any language packs. As Steve says if I install any one language pack (to be precise, at least the libobasis4._-__ package) for an Indian language (I tried Tamil and he tried Hindi so I guess the rest would be same too) the CTL combobox in the Tools > Options dialogue gets enabled and also the font dialog is upgraded to show a separate "Western text font" from a "CTL font", in which the combobox providing the language of the CTL font includes names of Indian languages. Still the combobox for the "Western text font" does not provide the names of Indian languages. The whole Western text font vs CTL font is a quite silly segregation -- I am not sure what it is in aid of. It seems to be copied from Microsoft Office. Even when I was using MS Office 2003 I used to either remove all langpacks so this extra field gets removed or otherwise I had to bear the burden of specifying my desired font twice. Lots of fonts (Sanskrit 2003 is an excellent example for Devanagari, and of course the FreeFont family for all Indic scripts and more) provide for both English/European and Indic, especially because lots of people who write about Indian literature etc would like to seamlessly switch between the two scripts. In this situation, what is the big usefulness in providing the "Western text" font vs "CTL font" bifurcation? I don't see the point in marking the same span of text with two fonts while only one is actually going to be used in the end at one time. If a font doesn't provide for two scripts, it is not a big deal to switch between fonts for the respective text spans. For instance, if one were to switch between Latin and Cyrillic where (assuming) the default font one uses for Latin doesn't provide for Cyrillic text, one has to switch anyway. How is the "Western" vs "CTL" situation any different? If at all one wishes to provide per-script font selection capability, one should go the full way through and do something like Firefox, which provides for font selection per script -- not some developer-imposed segregation between "Western" and "CTL" scripts. Next, why should I be required to install a langpack to get the list of full languages? I have never used the LibO interface in any language other than English but I heavily use LibO to input Indian language text -- why is the one connected to the other? Further, note that ISO 15919 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_15919) is an international standard which permits the transliteration of Indian script text into Latin script extended with diacritics. This is widely used by scholars who aren't necessarily Indians and who can't even read the native Indian scripts to store, quote and research texts written in Indic languages. In this case the script is a "Western" script but the language is an Indian language. So why the unnecessary connection between script and language? Let the software not try to be more intelligent than the user! And let us not have blind imitation of Microsoft Office idiosyncrasies in LibO. I like LibO very much and wish to see it improve. Hence I have made the above frank comments re the current situation. Please do not take them amiss. Thank you for all your excellent work on LibO! -- You are receiving this mail because: You are the assignee for the bug.
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