Using Built-in Language tools

Getting Started with Apache OpenOffice 4

Chapter 3: Getting Started with Writer

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• What Is Writer?
• The Writer interface
• Changing Document Views
• Moving Quickly through a Document
• Working with documents
• Working with text
  • Selecting Items That Are Not Consecutive
  • Selecting a Vertical Block of Text
  • Cutting, Copying, and Pasting Text
  • Finding and Replacing Text and Formatting
  • Inserting Special Characters
  • Inserting Dashes and Non-breaking Spaces and Hyphens
  • Setting Tab Stops and Indents
  • Changing the Default Tab stop Interval
  • Checking Spelling and Grammar
  • Using Built-in Language tools
  • Using AutoCorrect
  • Using Word Completion
  • Using AutoText
• Formatting Text
  • Formatting Paragraphs
  • Formatting Characters
  • Auto-formatting
  • Creating Numbered or Bulleted Lists
  • Hyphenating Words
• Formatting Pages
  • Which Layout Method to Choose?
  • Creating Headers and Footers
  • Numbering Pages
  • Changing Page Margins
• Adding Comments and Graphics to a Document
• Creating a Table of Contents
• Creating Indexes and Bibliographies
• Adding Images and Other Graphics
• Adding Tables, Spreadsheets, and Charts
  • Creating a Table from a Calc Spreadsheet
  • Creating a Chart
• Adding a Movie or Sound
• Printing
• Using Mail Merge
• Tracking Changes to a Document
• Using Fields
• Linking to another part of a document
  • Using Hyperlinks
  • Using Cross-References
  • Using Bookmarks
• Using Master Documents
• Creating Fill-in Forms

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Using Built-in Language tools

Writer provides some tools that make your work easier if you mix multiple languages within the same document or if you write documents in various languages.

The main advantage of changing the language is that you can then use the correct dictionaries to check spelling and apply the localized versions of AutoCorrect replacement tables, thesaurus, and hyphenation rules.

You can also set the language for a paragraph or a group of characters as None. This option is especially useful when you insert text such as web addresses or programming language snippets that you do not want to check for spelling.

Specifying the language in character and paragraph styles is the preferred method, because styles allow a greater level of control and make changing the language much faster. On the Font tab of the Paragraph Styles dialog, you can specify that certain paragraphs be checked in a language that is different from the language of the rest of the document. See Chapter 7 (Working with Styles) in the Writer Guide for information on how to manage the language settings of a style.

You can set the language for the whole document, for individual paragraphs, or even for individual words and characters, all from Tools → Language on the menu bar.

Another way to change the language of a whole document is to use Tools → Options → Language Settings → Languages. In the Default languages for documents section of the Options dialog, you can choose a different language for all the text.

The spelling checker works only for those languages in the list that have the Checkmark symbol next to them. If you do not see the symbol next to your preferred language, you can install the additional dictionary using Tools → Languages → More dictionaries online.

The language used for checking spelling is also shown in the status bar, next to the page style in use.