how many languages can LO support at the same time. . .

users
#1

The problem I have with "selling" LO to computer centers, both regular and ones that teach English as a second language, is how many languages can LO support at the same time.

I am talking about two ways. 1 - usable dictionaries in the list. 2 - different languages you can change your menus to.

The first one is the key for me.

You have English, French, Spanish [3 regional versions], Italian, and 4 or 5 other different language dictionaries, installed and enabled, in the Extension Manager. How many of those languages are usable to the user writing documents in English and one or two other languages at a time, then someone else sits down and tried to use his or hers language[s] with English. So how many installed and enabled languages can be used at the same time? I was told there was a very small limited number.

Then the second is not much of a problem for me. Yet, since you can switch between language packs and their help packs, how many can you install and be able to switch back and forth between English and the other non-English languages?

Of course, if a center worker needs to switch the menus back to English, or to their default settings, how easy is it if the person/worker does not read/speak the language the menu is currently in? Is it possible to make a script to reset the "preferences" back to a default instead of some manual copy/paste-over some file?

I do not use any language, other than American English, but others do need to deal with more than one language. I met a lady a number of years ago. She was from my area of the USA, but she worked in Israel as a travel "advisor". She had to use several different packages of MS Office, since she needed to write in English, French, Hebrew, and one other language that I cannot remember the name of. I told her that with the language support of LO she could use it to write in which ever language she needed to do. I do not know if LO can write both English and Hebrew, since one is left to right and the other is right to left [if I remember correctly], but if the document was only in Hebrew, or English, or French, no problems. One package can do what she needs to do. We have the language support and the spell checking dictionaries to be added on with the language packs or via the Extension Manager and a lot of various language spell checking and other language aid extensions, sometimes several different ones for the same language.

So multi-lingual users, multi-lingual computer center users, etc., etc., need to know what the limits to the number of languages supported at the same time for LO.

If there is a small number for the limit, can you switch the supported languages around by enabling/disabling them in the Extension Manager? Have 10 languages listed in the E.M. and you disable all but the 2,3, or 4, language used within the current document. Then disable some of the current ones and enable others. Would that allow the supporting of 10 or 20 different languages and/or regional variations?

Español (España) es_es--España
vs.
Español (México) es_mx--México
vs.
Español (Cuba) es_cu--Cuba
vs.
Español (Venezuela) es_ve--Venezuela
vs.
Español (Argentina) es_ve--Argentina

Or
American English
vs.
British English
vs.
British Oxford English
vs.
New Zealand English
vs.
South African English

plus the different version of French, German, and other languages that have different variations, regional or otherwise.

As some people have pointed out to me, if I write an document for the U.K., I need to spell color "colour" to get it correctly spelled for their region, since my American spelling of "color" would be shown up misspelled in their systems as "colour" is misspelled in mine.

So switching between regional language variants is as important as switching to totally different languages.

So how many of these languages, and their variants, can LO support and use at one time?

We could use that in our marketing for LO to schools, computer centers, and multi-lingual users, organizations, and businesses.

#2

I can't vouch for the second point, but regarding available dictionaries,
here's my experience: I currently have ​​LibreOffice 4.1.4.2 installed
under Windows, with the default installation package. In the list of
available languages for dictionaries it give me a quite long list. Granted,
some are "variations" (like multiple "english" ones), but even then,
there's quite a few. I believe that all of them can be used without
restriction. At least there is none visible.
I wrote a small document with four paragraphs, in French, English, Deutsh
and Russian, and was able to set each paragraph to use the correct
dictionary with minimal effort:
<http://cjoint.com/?DABh5HY3AzL>
By moving the cursor from one line to another, you should see the language
change in the statusbar. There's multiple way to change the language for a
paragraph, but here's two that are quite fast and accessible:
- Click in the statusbar on the language portion, that will show you a
popup menu, you can then choose "set language for paragraph"
- In the "Tools" menu, go to "Language"

I think this should answer your first concern.

#3

Just a confirmation of what Kracked says:

I have documents with three languages in use at the same time (English,
Greek, and Thai) and can confirm that (at least once you have things set up
properly) it is easy to switch among them and all the features seem to work
as far as I've noticed. This is particularly notable in the case of Thai,
since there are typically no spaces between words, only between sentences -
if things weren't working pretty well, bizarre word wrapping and such would
probably expose the problem fairly quickly.

I also used to attempt this in an older version of MS-Word and had some
difficulties, but as I recall, that was due to older font technology and
lack of Unicode support.

So, your answer is "at least three."

#4

Hi :slight_smile:
For the 2nd point.
It's fairly easy to guess which menu is the Tools menu, and "Options"
is at the bottom. Then it's a bit tricky to figure which page but
once you do get to the drop-downs to select language En(Us) is written
in the 'foreign' language but has brackets giving a clue, such as (US)
after the English ones

At first i didn't notice that so i had to have 2 machines open, 1 in
English, so i could figure out how to navigate to the right place.
Regards from
Tom :slight_smile:

#5

Hi,

Kracked_P_P---webmaster schrieb:

The problem I have with "selling" LO to computer centers, both regular
and ones that teach English as a second language, is how many languages
can LO support at the same time.

I am talking about two ways. 1 - usable dictionaries in the list. 2 -
different languages you can change your menus to.

The first one is the key for me.

You have English, French, Spanish [3 regional versions], Italian, and 4
or 5 other different language dictionaries, installed and enabled, in
the Extension Manager. How many of those languages are usable to the
user writing documents in English and one or two other languages at a
time, then someone else sits down and tried to use his or hers
language[s] with English. So how many installed and enabled languages
can be used at the same time? I was told there was a very small
limited number.

I know no restriction. StarOffice was shipped with about fourteen languages and had over twenty Autotext variants. Why do not test it?

Then the second is not much of a problem for me. Yet, since you can
switch between language packs and their help packs, how many can you
install and be able to switch back and forth between English and the
other non-English languages?

Some as above, I know no restriction.

Of course, if a center worker needs to switch the menus back to English,
or to their default settings, how easy is it if the person/worker does
not read/speak the language the menu is currently in?

If the language is bound to the person, you can use different user settings and provide each user a prepared link to his special user settings.
For example on Windows
"C:\Program Files\LibreOffice 4\program\soffice.exe" -env:UserInstallation=file:///f:/SoftwareLO/user_DE

will launch LibreOffice with the user settings in folder f:/SoftwareLO/user_DE. And this different user settings can use different languages in UI. You can even run LibreOffice one time and have several calls to it with different user settings parallel.

   Is it possible to

make a script to reset the "preferences" back to a default instead of
some manual copy/paste-over some file?

Changing the UI from one language to another for the same user requires to restart LibreOffice.

I do not use any language, other than American English, but others do
need to deal with more than one language. I met a lady a number of
years ago. She was from my area of the USA, but she worked in Israel as
a travel "advisor". She had to use several different packages of MS
Office, since she needed to write in English, French, Hebrew, and one
other language that I cannot remember the name of. I told her that with
the language support of LO she could use it to write in which ever
language she needed to do. I do not know if LO can write both English
and Hebrew, since one is left to right and the other is right to left
[if I remember correctly], but if the document was only in Hebrew, or
English, or French, no problems.

It is no problem. For example, if the person likes to use an English keyboard layout, you can write a couple of macros to insert the special characters of French. You can bind them to short cut keys or provide a toolbar, where the icons show the character. So they can be used without using the Insert-Special-Character dialog and without remembering unicode code point.

If the whole document is in a foreign language, than provide a suitable document template, where the language is already set in the default template.

For switching inside a document you do not only have the already mentioned hard formatting methods, but you can define paragraph styles for each needed language and collect them into a document templates.

   One package can do what she needs to

do. We have the language support and the spell checking dictionaries to
be added on with the language packs or via the Extension Manager and a
lot of various language spell checking and other language aid
extensions, sometimes several different ones for the same language.

So multi-lingual users, multi-lingual computer center users, etc., etc.,
need to know what the limits to the number of languages supported at the
same time for LO.

I suggest, to test it. All those packages are free, and you can say 'I have tested it, it works at least with ...languages.'

Kind regards
Regina

#6

The last time I tested the language dictionary issue, there seemed to a limit of 3 or 4. I do not have the test document anymore that had several non-English languages so retesting it would be a problem for me right now.

Why talk about StarOffice at this point? There has been so much modifications to the original code to make it OOo and then LO, you cannot rely on things working the same as it did back with StarOffice. I have had font listing issues that came into being when I went from one version of LO to another one, then it was fixed in a later version.

Your launch coding is something that I have not seen before. So it might help, as long as you know how to set up all of these users files.

The macro idea is fine, if you can write one, which I cannot and the potential users should not be asked to do.

Inserting "special characters" for Español [Spanish] and Français [French] is easy if you have a Unicode font or a good inclusive one that has the needed characters when viewed with the Insert Special Character option. I have done that myself for a few things.

#7

Inserting "special characters" for Español [Spanish] and Français
[French] is easy if you have a Unicode font or a good inclusive one that
has the needed characters when viewed with the Insert Special Character
option. I have done that myself for a few things.

When typing European Languages, as well as the LibO option of Insert Special
Characters you can also define the Keyboard as extended. (details will
differ depending on your operating system). This allows you to type French,
German characters directly (áéîçßýð) and the € (euro) sign and not
forgetting «», the French quotation marks. In Europe the level 3 key is
called Alt Gr but I believe that many America keyboards label it simply as
the Alt key on the right of the keyboard.

In Europe, keyboards default to extended, but this is not the case in
America.. Peter

#8

The last time I tested the language dictionary issue, there seemed to
a limit of 3 or 4. I do not have the test document anymore that had
several non-English languages so retesting it would be a problem for
me right now.

Why talk about StarOffice at this point? There has been so much
modifications to the original code to make it OOo and then LO, you
cannot rely on things working the same as it did back with
StarOffice. I have had font listing issues that came into being when
I went from one version of LO to another one, then it was fixed in a
later version.

The first move of Sun when they acquired StarOffice and begun with
OpenOffice was to restrict both the multi language capability of
StarOffice to 3 languages and its html capability. They called it
OpenOffice.
This was a little but tricky to install, but it was possible to make it
work with more than 3 languages even at that time.

They bring back the multi language capabilities one year later or so in
OpenOffice, and from that time it have just be working fine with how
many languages are available and installed.

The html capability is another story. It is only recently, after the
move to LibreOffice, that it have finally been updated, which I am very
grateful.

Dominique

#9

>
> The last time I tested the language dictionary issue, there seemed
> to a limit of 3 or 4. I do not have the test document anymore that
> had several non-English languages so retesting it would be a
> problem for me right now.
>
> Why talk about StarOffice at this point? There has been so much
> modifications to the original code to make it OOo and then LO, you
> cannot rely on things working the same as it did back with
> StarOffice. I have had font listing issues that came into being when
> I went from one version of LO to another one, then it was fixed in a
> later version.

The first move of Sun when they acquired StarOffice and begun with
OpenOffice was to restrict both the multi language capability of
StarOffice to 3 languages and its html capability. They called it
OpenOffice.
This was a little but tricky to install, but it was possible to make
it work with more than 3 languages even at that time.

They bring back the multi language capabilities one year later or so
in OpenOffice, and from that time it have just be working fine with
how many languages are available and installed.

At least on Linux.

#10

Hi :slight_smile:
I was wondering it there is likely to be a slow-down in opening or
normal usage when there are a lot of languages installed.

It might be my imagination but it seems like some of the lower spec
machines here seemed to load LibreOffice more slowly until i dropped
to just 1 or 2 languages per machine.
Regards from
Tom :slight_smile:

#11

The more UI languages that are installed, the more RAM LibO needs.
The more dictionaries that are installed, the more RAM is needed.
The more extensions that are installed, the more RAM is needed.

If there is not enough RAM, then the swap partition is used.
(I've noticed that recent versions of a number of Linux distros do not automatically create a swap partution that is the size mandated by the Linux kernel specs and expectations.)

Other than the obvious, I do't know how much of a factor chip speed is.
Nor do I know what effect the nu,ber of cores has on LibO performance.

#12

TomD wrote

Hi :slight_smile:
I was wondering it there is likely to be a slow-down in opening or
normal usage when there are a lot of languages installed.

Hi!

"tk" below says that RAM usage of LO grows as languages used increases.

I think it's generally true. But I would like to offer my opinion, although
I haven't dambled in developing LO at all.

If no additional language packs are used, RAM increase would be trivial, as
the application simply allocates a new data structure to store the scripts
from the new languages. I don't see why memory store for Asian text or
complex script should be so much larger than typical western texts as to eat
up RAM this quick. This is not simply a byte calculation. Different
languages have different entropy values.

But to be more precise, if a new language you introduce in to the document
involves activation of text processing not required by the languages already
used in the doc, extra memory is needed for this job. For example, you begin
typing in some Chinese characters in a language already with English,
Spanish, French and German texts. Chinese is Asian text and has its own
processing rules, and LO has to turn on Asian text typography to support
hadling of Asian texts. This may involve loading a series of libraries,
which is not likely to happen if you type some Swedish instead. Similary, if
you then type in some Arabic then the bi-directional processing libraries
would also have to be loaded to support complex scripts, which is not likely
to happen if you type some Norwegian instead.

#13

Hi *,

The problem I have with "selling" LO to computer centers, both regular and
ones that teach English as a second language, is how many languages can LO
support at the same time.

The limit is only the diskspace and RAM (when having spellchecking in
all languages enabled)

I am talking about two ways. 1 - usable dictionaries in the list. 2 -
different languages you can change your menus to.

As much as you install/as much as there are available.
But if using lots of languages and lots of dictionaries, RAM usage
might be a limit on older systems.

The first one is the key for me.

You have English, French, Spanish [3 regional versions], Italian, and 4 or 5
other different language dictionaries, installed and enabled, in the
Extension Manager. How many of those languages are usable to the user
writing documents in English and one or two other languages at a time,

all of them. Provided that you did install the extension as
administrator for all users, and not for a single user only.

then
someone else sits down and tried to use his or hers language[s] with
English. So how many installed and enabled languages can be used at the
same time? I was told there was a very small limited number.

I don't quite understand this sentence, and whoever did tell you that
the usage of languages would be limited. But it's not true, except
maybe for RAM usage if LO needs to load many large dictionaries for
many languages.

Then the second is not much of a problem for me. Yet, since you can switch
between language packs and their help packs, how many can you install and be
able to switch back and forth between English and the other non-English
languages?

You can install all of them and switch between all of them. Diskspace
is the limitation here.
And you probably don't want to have users switch between UI languages
all the time, but rather have different (system level) user-accounts
for that, as very likely LO won't be the only software that should
display another UI language....

Of course, if a center worker needs to switch the menus back to English, or
to their default settings, how easy is it if the person/worker does not
read/speak the language the menu is currently in?

If they did it once, no problem, Just remember at what position
Tools>Options is, then you can just click through the option dialog
until you find the right tab.

Is it possible to make a
script to reset the "preferences" back to a default instead of some manual
copy/paste-over some file?

It is possible, but doesn't really make sense. Use different
system-accounts for that.

She had to use several different packages of MS Office, since
she needed to write in English, French, Hebrew, and one other language that
I cannot remember the name of.

To make this perfectly clear: You don't need to install the
corresponsing UI package to write in a foreign language.
You can write arabic, chinese, german, etc all with using the english UI.

I do
not know if LO can write both English and Hebrew, since one is left to right
and the other is right to left [if I remember correctly],

No problem with mixing - but you need to tell LO what alignment is the
"master" one, i.e. is it hebrew with some english text in it, or the
other way round. This is either per paragraph or per
document/page-style.

As some people have pointed out to me, if I write an document for the U.K.,
I need to spell color "colour" to get it correctly spelled for their region,
since my American spelling of "color" would be shown up misspelled in their
systems as "colour" is misspelled in mine.

So switching between regional language variants is as important as switching
to totally different languages.

The language of text is part of the character properties and is
inherited the usual way:
direct formatting, character template, paragraph formatting, paragraph
template, document setting.

So how many of these languages, and their variants, can LO support and use
at one time?

No limit.

ciao
Christian

#14

Hi *,

The language of text is part of the character properties and is
inherited the usual way:
direct formatting, character template, paragraph formatting, paragraph
template, document setting.

A careful reader pointed out to me that the language cannot be set in
Format>Paragraph (i.e. no direct format on a paragraph level exists
for this, only in the paragraph style).
So while you can assign a language to an entire paragraph using the
language item in the Statusbar or using the contextmenu while
spell-checking, this sets the character format accordingly.

But of course the basic idea still holds true - you can define the
language globally, and can gradually override them to a different one.
Which method to choose depends on the nature of the document. But when
working with different writing systems, very likely you will use the
paragraph template method, as usually you'd use a different font as
well.

ciao
Christian