James C. Sutherland wrote:
On May 12, 2009, at 2:50 PM, Uwe Stöhr wrote:
James C. Sutherland schrieb:
Is there a way of disabling "Language Support" in LyX? Every time
that I paste text between documents I get blue underlining of the
text and have to "reset" the language to get rid of it.
Then the document language of both LyX documents is not the same. So
have a look at the document settings and correct the language there
(and save the right one as the default language that is used for new
documents).
regards Uwe
I deduced this. However, I really don't want to have any notion of the
"language" my documents are written in. So to repeat my original
question, can I just turn off all of this language business altogether?
LyX is not supposed to annoy you with lots of language switching -
_unless_ you actually work with documents in several languages.
The fix for your problems is not to disable language support, but to
ensure that all your documents are in the same language. (In your case,
I guess that will be the same variety of English.) Existing documents
can be fixed by setting them all to the same language, and then use
"select all" and revert any language settings using the edit->textstyle
dialog. Also, when setting document language to your preference
(american english?), save this as a default, so you won't ever need to
set the language for new documents. If LyX still causes language
trouble, report what happens so it can be fixed.
LyX cannot produce its nice-looking output without knowing the language.
The good-looking straight margins require some hyphenation, but
hyphenation conventions vary a lot between languages. You definitely
want that to match the language in use, or you could get hyphenation so
stupid that a 12-year old word-user will see it is wrong. In short, the
writing will seem unprofessional.
LyX will sometimes add its own text, such as the word "chapter" or
"index" or phrases like "on page 23" or "Table of contents". Clearly, it
is necessary to know what language to use for such text. English is just
one of many options here.
And then there is all sorts of typographic conventions. English writing
have some conventions for spacing, such as more space after a period
that ends a sentence. And the spacing between headings and the text that
follows. These conventions are different for other languages. Again,
getting this wrong will usually make your documents look amateurish.
Helge Hafting
