Setting the language for the spell-check

[Flo]

I second the wish that there needs to be a third method to assign language to parts of the text. Choosing the language manually has worked fine so far for me, but confronted with long documents that include many footnotes, I’d want to avoid to have to manually select all of them.

I use the same keyboard layout to write in different languages; thus, linking the language to the keyboard layout does not work for me. (These are not entirely different languages such as Chinese and English, but French, German and English. The keyboard layouts are similar enough in the sense that all of them work fine for all of these languages, but they are different enough that switching to another one obstructs a fluid writing process – the German and English layout, for instance, switch the location of the "y" and "z".)

Making the language setting a style attribute would not work for me either, since I use, for instance, one style set for documents in different languages, but usually not just one set, but several sets with slightly different layouts. If language was part of a style set and I had to create multiple style sets, changing a layout feature in one style set would require me to change it manually in the other sets. And the number of style sets would explode. (Anyway, as mentioned in an earlier post, it would be good to be able to organize/group style sets as my list is already "cluttered".)

(By the way: as the predominant character attribute logic in Mellel is, in my view, that most or all of the character attributes are part of a style, it took me a while to realize that language is a character attribute, but not part of a character style. This could, maybe, be explained more clearly in the Mellel guide.)

[Eyal Redler]

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.

As i've said, this is a character attribute and therefore is something that is assigned on the "c" level. But why does it matter?

"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."

That could certainly be the case but what is it specifically that you're missing? What kind of task/workflow/layout would you like to be enabled by this?

[Eyal Redler]

I second the wish that there needs to be a third method to assign language to parts of the text.

I agree, but it is not at all clear what kind of method it would be.

Choosing the language manually has worked fine so far for me, but confronted with long documents that include many footnotes, I’d want to avoid to have to manually select all of them.

Note that you can use the method I've outlined earlier in the thread to assign a language to text in specific style (use a find set to make this apply to a set of styles). You can also use the following to assign a language to the entire text of the document, including footnotes and endnotes:
1. Open the find dialog
2. In the Find field insert "Anything"
3. In the Replace field, insert "Found Expression"
4. While the cursor still in the replace filed, choose the desired language you wish to apply
5. Click "Replace all"

[Feanaaro]

[quote="Eyal Redler"][quote="Flo"]I second the wish that there needs to be a third method to assign language to parts of the text.[/quote]
I agree, but it is not at all clear what kind of method it would be.
[/quote]
It would be within character styles.

[rpcameron]

I second the wish that there needs to be a third method to assign language to parts of the text.

I agree, but it is not at all clear what kind of method it would be.

It would be within character styles.

I don't feel that it necessarily has to be within the character style. However, it should be part of a style somehow. Presently, Mellel is treating the language setting as style override, or an ad hoc change. Every time that spell check is to be used in the document, the author must specify exactly which sections are to be checked with which language dictionary. This is completely unintuitive, and seems to fly against the way that Mellel puts such a strong emphasis on styles.

The user is already setting language type attributes in 2 different places if they are using styles:

1. Hyphenation dictionary in paragraph styles. This setting is language dependent, but Mellel ignores this information when it comes to spell checking.
2. Script setting in character styles. While this is not specific to a language per se, it too can be seen as a need to change language, as some languages can be written with multiple scripts, and often a separate dictionary is needed.

In either case, it's obvious there is something wrong with language settings in Mellel. For a program that seems to want the user to strive to use styles to make documents easier to craft and style, being able to do something as simple as check the spelling in the document has become a chore, and seems to be merely an afterthought.

Going back to the original post and request:

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).

This is what the real crux is, and is what everyone seems to be asking. There really ought to be a way to integrate the language setting into styles somehow. Whether that is done through the introduction of a phrasal level of styling between character and paragraph styles, or if scripts and languages are separated out of character styles into a new script style, the point is that something is not working well and it ought to be fixed.

[Feanaaro]

I know, the original post was mine in fact. The intervened discussion, however, has convinced me that the right place is character styles. This especially because, since character styles can be linked to paragraph styles, such option would be still suitable for those that would prefer to set the language at the paragraph level (like probably myself) without depriving anyone of a more granular choice.

[Flo]

Just to restate my preference: As I am using my the style sets for different languages, I’d prefer a "third" method (sorry, no idea how to implement this), something that let’s me use one style set for different languages. (It that sense, the existing method works already quite well, except for selecting large chunks of texts incl. footnotes. If this search and replace expression outlined above could be incorporated into the language selection menu, this would work fine for me.)

[Feanaaro]

In the new version, 3.1, I only see a minor change, that is that now new footnotes retain the language of the text they refers to.
Besides that, the behaviour is extremely odd.
• The option to set the default language does not seem to work, whatever I set (or not) there, I always get a new document with Italian as its language (I guess because it is my system language). However, this apply only to SOME templates (both new and old), other are by default set to "none" as a language, and others to American English, why is it so, there being no option regarding language in the document properties, is a mystery.
Additionally:
– IF I change the styleset (regardless of which one I choose), the language goes to the one set as default, whatever it is.
– BUT this only happens if I change the style set BEFORE writing anything, otherwise the language stays Italian
– but, IF I check the option to syncronize language and keyboard layout, then typing something actually brings the language in sync with the chosen one, regardless of the styleset.

This is marginally better than the previous behaviour, but still far from ideal. It works slightly better for my own workflow (except that I still have to revise by hand all the old documents, especially footnotes), but it defeats the purpose of working with multiple languages within one document, which basically can only be done by hand chunk of text by chunk of text, or not at all.
Most annoyingly, the underlying logic of the system (if there is any) is very obscure.
I reiterate my proposal to make the language an attribute which can be linked to character styles.
Current situation is messy and needlessly complicated.

[Eyal Redler]

Thanks for your comments Feanaaro, we will take all the issues you've raised into consideration and we plan to introduce further improvements in the Language system very soon.
Regarding the default language. At the moment this setting only effects the text of older or imported documents (as stated right next to the "make default" checkbox in the preferences). For new documents, the language is determined by the template used to create them. This is something that we plan to change soon to enable you to simply select the default language via the preferences but in the meanwhile, here's how you can setup your template to have the right language from the outset.
1. Open a new document
2. Type some text
3. Select the text and apply the desired language.
4. (you may want to make further adjustments to the template like setting a style set, auto title setup, configuring footnotes streams and so on)
5. Delete the text you've typed in step 2
6. Choose File->Save as template, name your template and click "Make default"
7. Save the template and you're done, new documents based on this templates will have the language set correctly.

[Feanaaro]

Thanks, this is helpful. Hoping for a fuller solution in the future.