https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=131487
--- Comment #22 from Callegar <[email protected]> --- @Mike Kagansky What I am trying to communicate, with a sadly negative outcome, is that the number of false negatives with the proposed approach should be way less than the number of false negatives without it. And this is somehow funny, because the reason why this bug got originally opened was precisely *false negatives*, not false positives. The reason why the bug was opened is not the burden of avoiding the red underline on "mixed-language words" (setting the language to "[None]" for the whole word or changing the language of half of it is equally expensive) but the fact that to avoid the red underlining users are currently pushed to adopt "[None]" that typically ends up in a debacle of false negatives. Once you start writing things like "dell'International" either you live happy with the distracting red underlining indicating a potential misspell or you don't. If you don't there the problem of false negatives explodes! If you add the word to the "dictionary" corresponding to the initial character, you pollute that dictionary with something that does not belong to it and that will cause false negatives. And if you set the language to "[None]" that is really the worst that you could do. Because "[None]" sticks. As soon as you edit that piece of text (e.g. erasing International and changing it into another piece of text, or even just writing something after the last 'l' of International) that text will continue to be in language "[None]". And because there is no visual indication of language "[None]" (it is not like when you leave on bold, or italics, or a color, that immediately gives you a visual feedback), whole chunks of text will remain without any spellchecking at all. Really, I don't think that we should encourage users to switch words to language "[None]" lightly, unless the software is also made to provide a way (a button?) to temporarily highlight the regions of text set to "[None]" and as such deprived of spellcheck, because once you start with "[None]" is way too easy to end up with whole paragraphs like that through editing. On the other hand, my proposal is likely to cause less harm. Setting the language to be "half Italian and half English" on a "word" like "dell'International" is semantically plausible (the word is indeed half Italian and half English) and to consider a word like that Italian is quite arbitrary (why not English?). Most important, when you edit the language selection shall either remain Italian or English, depending on where you edit. The other way round, the possibility that you end up switching language mid-word "by accident" cannot be expected to be very frequent (at least in my experience). In any case, I accept the fact that being Italian I may be biased towards observing what happens in Italian texts with English words and that there may be other languages with rules that I do not know for which the current behavior is better. So why not considering the addition of a flag in the "Options->Language Settings->Writing Aids" settings (possibly document-specific) such as "Use writing aids on mixed language words" to be "On" by default (the current behavior) but switchable to "Off". -- You are receiving this mail because: You are the assignee for the bug.
