Re: [libreoffice-marketing] how many languages can LO support at the same time. . .

Hi *,

On Mon, Jan 27, 2014 at 4:52 AM, Kracked_P_P---webmaster
<webmaster@krackedpress.com> wrote:
> 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

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