On 24/11/2007 08:44, tina yung wrote:
I am thinking about downloading and using OpenOffice but the only English
version appears to be USEnglish. I need to use proper English in my word
proccessing documents and I was wondering if OO has UK English capabilities
like MSOffice e.g. UK English dictionary ?
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There is a difference between an "English version" of OpenOffice and the
language(s) of your documents. The "English version" refers to the
language in which menus, help text, error messages, tool tips etc. are
displayed. This is determined by the "language pack" you install and is
referred to as the User Interface or UI language.
The languages of your documents depend on which dictionaries you choose
to use. It is quite possible to have a "French (UI) version" but to
write documents which are correctly spell checked in English. Or to have
a German version and to write a document which is partly spell checked
in French and partly in English.
I use the American version because I'm not too bothered about seeing
Americanisms in Help text etc. But I use the British English dictionary
so that such Americanisms don't creep into my documents.
Assuming you are using Windows and that you have it configured for
British English - dates in dd/mm/yy format for example, then simply
install the US version of OpenOffice and then, from within Writer, do
File>Wizards>Install New Dictionaries. Follow the instructions to
install the British English dictionaries (spelling, hyphenation,
thesaurus). Having done that, do Tools>Options>Language
Settings>Languages and set the "Default Language for Documents" to
"English (UK)". Close Writer. Now any new documents you create will be
spell checked in UK English.
If you want to create multi-lingual documents with each part correctly
spell checked, you'll need to download all the relevant dictionaries,
change the Default Language for Documents to "none" and then create a
set of "paragraph styles" for each language. Now, when you want to write
in French you choose the relevant French paragraph style (heading, body
text, whatever); similarly for German you'd use the German paragraph
styles. And so on. Things get a little more complicated because of
accented characters, Scandinavian vowels etc. which might not appear on
your keyboard but all these issues are (a) easily solvable and (b)
entirely independent of which "version" of OO you have.
Working in Hebrew or other right-to-left languages is more complicated
again but also quite easy to achieve.
--
Harold Fuchs
London, England
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