Description of problem: If you install OpenOffice with English as user interface language then the spellchecker is English by default. If you want to change the spellchecker to for example Danish and still keep English as the user interface language, then that does not happen. After exit and reenter OpenOffice the spellchecker is back to English. It looks like you are not able to have different languages for these two options. It has been reported to the bug system for OpenOffice.org but they close the bug as invalid since vanilla generated OpenOffice does not have this bug. They mention that it probably is due to incorrect compilation/generation by the packager. Please see http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=65129 Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): The problem is with OpenOffice version 2.0.2. How reproducible: Steps to Reproduce: 1. Select Tools->Options->Language Setting->Languages 2. Check that the user interface labguage is set to "English (USA)" 3. Change under "Default languages for documents" "Western" from "English(USA)" to "Danish" which BTW must have the check mark before "Danish" to show that the language dictionary is installed. 4. Press OK and exit OpenOffice 5. Launch OpenOffice again and perform item 1. again You should now see that "Default languages for documents" is back to "English (USA)"
Because it defaults to your locale, you can change it for a given document but the default language for documents will always default to your locale in fedora. The UI is a little more clear in >= FC-6 than it is in FC-5. But you can change your default template to set a different default language for all new documents but keep the UI in the locale language.
I don't accept that default language for documents defaults to the locale for the following reasons: 1. If so it makes no sense to have a separate option for it. 2. The maintainer of OpenOffice claims you can set it in vanilla OpenOffice. See the link above to issue 65129. 3. The locale for my system is set to Danish yet the default language for documents reverts to English.
3. really ? can you just open a gnome-terminal and paste in the output of echo $LANG export LANG=da_DK.UTF-8 and launching writer in FC-6 gives danish as the default language for documents as I'd expect. I still think taking the default locale as the default language is a good idea, and in fact upstream OOo does this too, but only on "first start". On subsequent starts it will stick to the first set locale and need to be changed by the user to update. I still want to track the locale in most cases. But there is a good argument that this should happen only up until the user sets a locale in the UI i.e. have a "Default" entry which means take language from the locale but allow a manual selection to override this permanently.
Created attachment 152122 [details] Screen display of language settings. This attachment shows the export of the $LANG variable and the subsequent display of default language for documents as it appears when OpenOffice is launched after change of the variable.