Bug 118509 - Word Doc export assumes language DE
Summary: Word Doc export assumes language DE
Keywords:
Status: CLOSED NOTABUG
Alias: None
Product: Red Hat Raw Hide
Classification: Retired
Component: openoffice.org
Version: 1.0
Hardware: All
OS: Linux
medium
medium
Target Milestone: ---
Assignee: Caolan McNamara
QA Contact:
URL:
Whiteboard:
Depends On:
Blocks:
TreeView+ depends on / blocked
 
Reported: 2004-03-17 08:04 UTC by Trever Adams
Modified: 2007-04-18 17:04 UTC (History)
1 user (show)

Fixed In Version:
Clone Of:
Environment:
Last Closed: 2004-09-27 08:40:34 UTC
Embargoed:


Attachments (Terms of Use)

Description Trever Adams 2004-03-17 08:04:24 UTC
From Bugzilla Helper:
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.6)
Gecko/20040312 Galeon/1.3.13

Description of problem:
Any export (with any language selected) to a 97/2000/XP Word DOC file
will export it as Language DE.  I don't know if anyone cares about
this, but Word Perfect, on importing these files, sees the tag and
starts asking crazy spelling correction questions and marks the entire
file as spelled incorrectly.  At least, for my US English locales in
Linux/OpenOffice and Windows/PerfectOffice

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):
openoffice.org-1.1.0-30

How reproducible:
Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Create document
2. Save
3. Export as 97/2000/XP MS Word Doc
4. Import it into anything where you can see what language it is
declared as, it will always be german. (LANG DE)
    

Actual Results:  Language is DE in any document

Expected Results:  Language should be undeclared or should be declared
according to the preferences set (US/EN in my case)

Additional info:

Comment 1 Dan Williams 2004-03-17 14:42:31 UTC
Any chance you could attach the document, or at least a stripped down
document that exhibits this behavior?

Also could you do the following and report here?
1) In a terminal window, type "echo $LANG"
2) IN OOo, what are the values in the combo boxes of the
Tools->Options->Language Settings->Languages preference page?

Thanks....

Comment 2 Trever Adams 2004-03-17 17:13:31 UTC
$ echo $LANG
en_US.UTF-8

Language of Locale Setting: default
Default currency: default

Western Languages for documents western: English (USA)
asian/ctl are greyed out
the three checkboxes after that are all unchecked.

Maybe OOo doesn't understand US.UTF-8 and the default values are
screwed up?

Comment 3 Caolan McNamara 2004-09-27 08:40:34 UTC
wordperfect is borked. There is a document language set in .doc files,
and then there is a language property set on the default style, and
everything inherits from the default style. So if (as is certainly
exported correctly in 1.1.X) the default/normal style is exported with
a language "en-US" and the document language is exported as "de-DE"
then the text in the document is by default in english and not german,
so wordperfect thinking it is in german is plain wrong. What is set as
the "document language" doesn't actually matter to the user for
documents because if the language is set in the default/normal style
then it overrides the document language, and for .doc export/import
this always happens.

Now why do we export the documents with a language id of "german",
this is because for .doc files this language is the language which
will be used for the field names, like AUTHOR, PAGE NUM etc in the
document. Those must be exported in the language that matches the
document language id. The default/normal style can override it, but
the names of fields must be in this language. It just so happens that
the original developer of the .doc filter in OpenOffice.org was german
so he exported document languages of german and german field names. 

Since word 2000 msoffice itself also always exports documents with a
fixed document language id, in their case always english, regardless
of the actual language of the default style. i.e. word 2000+ does
exactly the same thing as OpenOffice.org 1.1.X, except using english
instead of german (theres a MSDN knowledge base article about it which
explains that they did it to be consistent in their VBA programming
environment where apparently code works on the field names, and
language differences were breaking macros).

Because of the ms change to a fixed english document language, for OOo
2.0 I also changed the export of .docs to be document language english
and use english field names, instead of german doc language and german
field names. This is purely a cosmetic change, expect for the obscure
issue of macros which work off the field string text.

What you are seeing makes me thing that there is a flaw in
wordperfect's .doc import, where they might have also have a similiar
difficulty with non us-english .doc generated from word 2000+. Its a
fair amount of effort to backport the 2.0 change to the 1.1.X series
to workaround a wordperfect flaw which I suspect would still affect
non us-ascii msword 2000+ created .docs.



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