Setting the language for the spell-check

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Feanaaro
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Setting the language for the spell-check

Post by Feanaaro »

It is my understanding that at present there are two ways of setting the language to be used for the spell-check.
1. by selecting the option to "synchronize language and keyboard" in the preferences
2. by manually selecting any chunk of text and assigning a language through the character tab

There need to be a third method, which must be to assign language through paragraph styles and/or character styles (the first seems more desirable to me).

I don't think I am the only one using one keyboard layout to write in multiple languages, and this is a clear problem in the present situation, because then the only way that I have to assign languages is number 2., which is inconvenient enough for the main text but becomes hell for footnotes, that cannot even be all selected with a single cmd+a (why is it so would be another complaint...). It would be even more inconvenient (though luckily it is not my case) if different languages were extensively used in the same document, which should be one of the main purpose of having the option in the first place. This also would be solved by having the possibility of assigning languages through paragraph styles.

Since the language for syllabizing can already be set within the paragraph style (in the modify styles window), it is even more incomprehensible why the same is not true for the spell-checking language, or even why the two are not the same (would someone want to have the spell-check done for a language and syllabizing for a different one???)

Please do something about this annoyance, or at the least someone explain me the reason for it. It is driving me crazy.
Eyal Redler
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Re: Setting the language for the spell-check

Post by Eyal Redler »

Feanaaro,

I regret hearing about your frustration. Language is a character attribute - setting it via the paragraph would be a bit inconsistent. We've decided to separate languages from styles because we we thought it is likely that you would use one style for more then one language.

Still, your post is thought provoking and we will consider adding the ability to associate languages with paragraph or character styles. In the meanwhile, note that you can use find and replace to automatically assign a language to text that is using a particular character style by doing the following:

1. Open the find dialog
2. In the find field, insert "anything" using the "insert element" popup menu
3. With the cursor in the find field, choose the character style
4. In the replace field, insert "found expression" using the "insert element" popup menu
5. Choose the desired language you wish to associate with that character style
6. Hit "Replace all" and Mellel will assign all text in that style with that language.

You can also store this find replace as a find action for fast retrieval in later time.
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Feanaaro
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Re: Setting the language for the spell-check

Post by Feanaaro »

Thanks for the "thought-provoking".

I gather that language is a character attribute, but the choice of making it so continues to seem incomprehensible to me. Maybe it covers something outside my normal use of Mellel, I don't know.
I would like to add the following points:
1- the user still has to set the syllabizing in the style set, therefore each style is already linked to a language, unless one does not use syllabizing at all (which would seem quite uncommon for the kind of academic work Mellel is geared toward)
2- it is very simple to duplicate a styleset and just change the language attribute. I did just that and routinely use two identical styles differing only for the dictionary used for syllabising. This is, in fact, not even optional, if one wants to use the correct syllabizing one has to have different paragraph styles for different languages
3- if my proposal were implemented, it could still be possible to set a different language for a given chunk of text, and therefore using the same style with different languages, just as it is now possible to select different chunks and assign different languages to them
4- now that I am explicitly thinking about the previous points, it seems to me that the case for unifying the language setting for spell-check and for syllabizing is even more compelling.
5- even if you want or have to maintain the language as a character attribute, you could still let us set it in the character style set. Since paragraph styles can themselves be assigned a corresponding character style, this would solve my problem just as elegantly (though this option might be partially in contrast with the previous point).

Meanwhile, thank you for the work-around tip.
kjmatthews
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Re: Setting the language for the spell-check

Post by kjmatthews »

I quite agree that, for the languages setting to be truly useful in multilingual documents, hyphenation dictionaries must be tied to language selection.
Eyal Redler
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Re: Setting the language for the spell-check

Post by Eyal Redler »

Some additional points regarding this.
1. It is possible and quite common to switch languages within the same paragraph. I don't think languages, as it relates to spelling, can or should be a paragraph attribute.
2. Since language must be a character attribute, it would be hard to choose which hyphenation dictionary to use if a paragraph contains more then one language.
3. We might be able to solve this by associating a language with paragraph styles like we do for character styles. (which basically means that we apply the attribute on the text when you apply the style but you can still change the attribute in the text to override this). We will definitely give this some thought and I hope we'll be able to introduce improvements soon (we already have some improvements in the pipeline, as we speak)
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Feanaaro
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Re: Setting the language for the spell-check

Post by Feanaaro »

[quote="Eyal Redler"]Some additional points regarding this.
1. It is possible and quite common to switch languages within the same paragraph. I don't think languages, as it relates to spelling, can or should be a paragraph attribute.[/quote]

If that is true, it should also be true for hyphenation, since words are hyphenated, not paragraphs.

[quote] 3. We might be able to solve this by associating a language with paragraph styles like we do for character styles. (which basically means that we apply the attribute on the text when you apply the style but you can still change the attribute in the text to override this). We will definitely give this some thought and I hope we'll be able to introduce improvements soon (we already have some improvements in the pipeline, as we speak)[/quote]
That would be a perfectly acceptable solution. I strongly support it.
kjmatthews
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Re: Setting the language for the spell-check

Post by kjmatthews »

Feanaaro wrote:
Eyal Redler wrote:1. It is possible and quite common to switch languages within the same paragraph. I don't think languages, as it relates to spelling, can or should be a paragraph attribute.
If that is true, it should also be true for hyphenation, since words are hyphenated, not paragraphs.
Precisely.
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Re: Setting the language for the spell-check

Post by Eyal Redler »

Very good point. However, hyphenation is a clearly paragraph setting. For example, on/off setting, hyphenation zone etc. The only thing that has smaller-then-a-paragraph-granualirty is the hyphenation dictionary which is, of-course, very much related to a language.

We might split this by having the hyphenation dictionary taken from the language and the other settings from the paragraph or maybe have the setting in both places but all this could get very confusing.

With all that said, this a very interesting discussion and an indication that we still need to shuffle some of these settings around.
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rpcameron
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Re: Setting the language for the spell-check

Post by rpcameron »

Eyal Redler wrote:Very good point. However, hyphenation is a clearly paragraph setting. For example, on/off setting, hyphenation zone etc. The only thing that has smaller-then-a-paragraph-granualirty is the hyphenation dictionary which is, of-course, very much related to a language.

We might split this by having the hyphenation dictionary taken from the language and the other settings from the paragraph or maybe have the setting in both places but all this could get very confusing.

With all that said, this a very interesting discussion and an indication that we still need to shuffle some of these settings around.
Discussion of better ways to support multi-lingual settings have been discussed since 2006 (or even earlier, but these are what I found with a quick search): What I am trying to show here is that this is something that users have been asking for for quite a long time, and in over 6 years there still has not been a satisfactory answer to the problem. I personally have had to change how I use Mellel and do my documents because of the lack of progress on some foundation features that I feel are necessary.

Hopefully these issues will adequately be addressed in the near future, but as I've said in the past, you cannot use (or purchase) software in the hopes of what it might one day do, but instead only evaluate it based upon what features it presently has; anything else is useless.
— Robert Cameron
Eyal Redler
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Re: Setting the language for the spell-check

Post by Eyal Redler »

Could you be more specific as to the missing elements in the language feature?
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rpcameron
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Re: Setting the language for the spell-check

Post by rpcameron »

Eyal Redler wrote:Could you be more specific as to the missing elements in the language feature?
Presently, language is set as an attribute of the character style. However, if you have multiple languages in a document (and wish them to share the same style), it would make more sense for the language setting to occupy one of two places:
  1. Language could belong to a style that resides somewhere between character and paragraph styles. The ideas already submitted call for it being a meta– or sentence–style. This would allow for multiple or various character styles to apply to such a sentence– (or perhaps better named, a phrasal–style, similar to (X)HTML's span element) style. The problem with having a language setting being part of the character style is that it limits the number of character styles available, since each language can only occupy one variation and you are limited to 8 variations of a style. Also, I can see this introducing issues because hyphenation—a paragraph level setting—and language—a character level setting—are intrinsically linked. Sometimes you may want one language hyphenated, but not another, yet if they reside in the same paragraph style, you're at an impasse of sorts.
  2. Another option would be to expand the scripts setting of the character style. By moving beyond only a second script, the user could add any number of script/language combinations to a particular character style. This would aid those who need more than 3 scripts in a document, especially because some languages use more than one script (e.g. Ugyar, Mongolian, Turkish, &c.), or several fields that use multiple languages and scripts (such as biblical studies with Latin, Greek, Syriac, Coptic, Arabic, &c.). Additionally, each script and/or language combination in a character style could also have a set of overrides for hyphenation, to either enforce hyphenation (useful for verbose languages such as those in the Germanic family) or to suppress hyphenation, irrespective of the paragraph style setting.
I believe that either scenario would be a marked improvement, as would many other users. Personally, I feel that a combination of both situations would probably best fit the bill, however I have only given thought to an either/or situation, so I am not certain how a compromise would work.

In any case, it is clear (and has been for quite some time as evidenced by the posts dating back over 6 years) that users feel Mellel's style system is still incomplete. (An additional step in the right direction, and perhaps an alternate solution to this situation, is perhaps the introduction of cascading styles …)
— Robert Cameron
shades
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Re: Setting the language for the spell-check

Post by shades »

Very well written description of what is needed, sir! Thank you. Your ideas express well my needs with regard to styles and multiple languages.
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Eyal Redler
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Re: Setting the language for the spell-check

Post by Eyal Redler »

rpcameron wrote:Presently, language is set as an attribute of the character style.
I'm a bit confused over this. Maybe I'm missing something here maybe you're speaking of a pre 3.0 version of Mellel but as of 3.0 Language is not part of the character style
  • • If you open the character style editing window you will not find "Language" there.
    • Applying a character style on a piece of text will not apply that language to the text
    • Changing the language of a piece of text will not register as an override (showing a + next to the style name)
Language is indeed a character attribute which means that you can have more then one language in a paragraph but it is not part of the character style.
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rpcameron
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Re: Setting the language for the spell-check

Post by rpcameron »

Eyal Redler wrote:
rpcameron wrote:Presently, language is set as an attribute of the character style.
I'm a bit confused over this. Maybe I'm missing something here maybe you're speaking of a pre 3.0 version of Mellel but as of 3.0 Language is not part of the character style
  • • If you open the character style editing window you will not find "Language" there.
    • Applying a character style on a piece of text will not apply that language to the text
    • Changing the language of a piece of text will not register as an override (showing a + next to the style name)
Language is indeed a character attribute which means that you can have more then one language in a paragraph but it is not part of the character style.
Well, sort of. Looking at how a Mellel file is actually structured, each time text is assigned a language or language is changed, a new c element is created in the DOM with a lang attribute. This is the same thing that happens whenever a character variation (a var attribute) is applied, or an ad hoc override (over attribute) is applied. Therefore, it makes sense that a different style can be be introduced to hold the language and possibly other settings, such as script. While a change in language does not show up in the interface as an override, internally it sure looks to be handled as one.

You were correct that I was thinking of previous versions and not 3.x. However, that does not change the fact that the way that languages are handled in Mellel still needs work.
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Feanaaro
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Re: Setting the language for the spell-check

Post by Feanaaro »

I just wanted to clarify that my original point wasn't even about MULTI-language within a document. I have problems now even with JUST ONE language, so long as I have to use more than one through DIFFERENT documents, because the way in which the language is set makes it a chore to set the spell-check in the right way, especially for footnotes. I would hope that more complex problems did not obscure this basic one.
Also, ever since the new way of handling languages has been introduced, the language setting within the grammar floating window seems to do nothing at all, i.e. whatever option is selected (Automatic for language, English, Italian etc.), the language of the spell-check is always the one selected as a character attribute, or no spell-check if no language is selected.
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