Update from a Framework/Writer Google Summer Of Code (tm) project

New Application for Status bar control to display/change the language

This project wants to improve the handling of languages in Writer documents. Currently OpenOffice.org doesn't provide an easy way to change the language of a word, paragraph or text selection within the Writer application. The user has to use the menu and a multi-tab dialog to choose the appropriate language. A status bar control which provides this function would greatly enhance usability for people who have to work with multiple language documents. We are making good progress and at half-time our student, Lili Sun from California (USA), implemented most of our required features for the status bar control. If anybody is interested to see the new control just try to build the CWS langstatusbar. I am sure that we can provide this great control for OpenOffice.org 2.4. To have an impression about the look of the feature you can find a screen shot from the latest CWS version below:

You can find more information inside the feature specification which is available here:
http://specs.openoffice.org/appwide/linguistic/Set_Language_Attribute_for_Text.odt

If you are interested in the progress of the feature task, just look at the following issue:
http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=77208

If you have questions or comments about the feature, please use the “dev” mailing list of the Openoffice.org Application Framework project (in case it's technically motivated) or the “discuss” list of the Openoffice.org User Experience project where you can discuss about the feature itself.

tags: framework gsoc openoffice.org

Comments:

great!
but (without discouraging or anything) why is that menu duplicated? you see a list of languages, select submenu, and then see the same list of languages again!?

Posted by sven on July 20, 2007 at 12:41 AM CEST #

The main menu sets the language for a text selection, the sub menu sets the current document language.

Posted by Carsten Driesner on July 20, 2007 at 09:46 AM CEST #