Hi Bjoern,  
 
 Good to hear from you again (BTW: Did you see the OOo 1.1 final will support Latin) 
 
I am very unsure about how to answer this. so for the time being please use the same iso 
as new German de_DE.   
 
I believe there is a Language Property (or spellcheck property?) that the user can set to 
indicate "old" German versus new German, so I could have MySpell examine that 
property and decide to spellcheck in either old or new dictionaries (assuming they both 
exist).   
 
Right now I think lingucomponent ignores this property but I can possibly check on that.  
   
Please forgive my ignorance of Old German, but can you help by answering these  
questions:  
  
1.  Does old German use the same character encodings  (ISO-8859-1) as new German or  
does it need a special encoding to generate special characters?  
  
2. Is it typical to find both old German and new German in the same document?  How  
does Star Handle this?  If so, they we either have to to have a character attribute that  
sets old verus new German or we have to use a differnt encoding (there is a third field in  
the locale that is typically not used.  We could use that field I suppose?)  
  
3. Under Star, what do the pull-down language menus menus say when you are using Old  
German?  
  
Unfortunately, StarOffice does not run on PPC Linux so I don't know much about how  
they handle this case.  
  
Any guidnace on how best to include this support would be appreciated.  
  
Kevin  
  

Hi Kevin! Yes, I read about the latin support, thank you very much
for your effort in this topic!
About the old German spelling:
1. iso-8859-1 or iso-8859-15 is fine, utf-8 would be okay, too
 (of cource). BTW - does iso-8859-* or utf-8 produce more overhead 
 when loading the dictionary or does this not matter at all?
2. There may be cases where people use old and new orthography in 
 the same document. I think in Star it behaves the same way as if 
 this would be two different languages.
 Do you mean setting the locale for old German to something 
 like de_DE.old or de_DE@old?
3. I only knew Staroffice 4.x and 5.x. There it used to be 
 called German (old spelling rules) or ...(new spelling rules).

I'm just about to download SO 6.1b1 ... okay ...ah.
StarOffice 6.1 does not seem to know anything about old/new
German spelling rules. As StarOffice 5.x, which supported 
both old and new spellings) had quite a different file format
it will not help you very much if I send you a sample file in
this format I guess. (?)
Anyone else knowing more about the OO/SO internals should
comment on this.

additional comment for the SUN folks: SO6.1 still ships with
both German L&H dictionaries: 49-spell.dat and 49-ospell.dat.
The user interface however does not allow selecting the old 
orthography.

I just installed an old SO 5.2 again here and I have to correct
myself. SO 5.2 did not list it as a separate language but as a
global linguistic option via a selectbox in the "linguistic"
section instead. In OO.o and SO6.1 that option is available
at almost the same place (extras->options->languagesettings->germal-spelling-old).
In my point of view it would be much nicer to have it selectable
as a quasi new language, this way it would also be possible
to have different paragraphs to be in old/new orthography.
If it would be selectable via a different language (just like
English (USA) and English (UK)) there wouldn't be a
German orthography option for all users who don't use
German at all. Wouldn't that be the cleaner solution?

Hi, 
 
I agree a separate language setting is the best.  However, I am not sure how we go about 
it.  We should probably ask i18n people how this might be done. 
 
From the Myspell end you could register it under any other unused locale but that is a 
hack. 
 
I think we should bring this up on dev@sw.openoffice.org and see what if anything 
Hamburg thinks here. 
 
Kevin 
 

do you have any news on this or can tell me how to mark the
dictionary so that myspell recognices it as (old) German
dictionary? The dictionary is ready so far, do you think the
lingucomponent stuff will get ready for that within the next
beta versions for people to test it? Thanks for your work...!

Hi, 
 
I am changing ownership of this to the I10n project in case someone there can help. 
 
 
Can anyone there tell us how to create a new (actually old) language support for Old 
German as its own language? 
 
Thanks, 
 
Kevin 
 

DL->ER: Could you please takeover?

The subject says it all, there simply is no way to distinguish between
old and new German orthography at the ISO level, and also not on the
MS-LANGID level. So there's nothing I could do about it, except
introduce a new LANGID defined in the user space and support of
variants on the ISO level (or "x-..." language identifiers). The
entire Office currently is not enabled to handle variants properly,
which of course would be a bigger task.

A spellchecker-only specific solution might be possible on a
short-term range, I therefore forward this to Thomas Lange, please
take over.

Thomas, please take over.

Since the spellchecker is called by the application for the specific
language of the word nothing can be done on the spellcheckers side
without introducing a new language or variant.
For example as done in OOo for Latin.

TL->BH: To youi since it is a request for enhancement.
Set type to enhancement.

OO.o does have an option for old/new German spelling, so what
would you suggest to do about this? It would be nice if 1.1final
would be able to switch between the 2 variants.
Not just the spelling rules are different, also the hyphenation
rules are different and I could provide you with the old German
hyphenation patterns if you want.

Hi, 
 
Those spell checking options do not allow you to mix Old and New German in the 
same document easily and it seems strange to special case just German that way. 
 
The right solution (IMHO) is to allow both de_DE and de_DE(OLD) or something 
along those lines so that it is treated as its own language and can be properly 
spellchecked and hyphenatoed even when mixed in the same document with new 
German. 
 
So my vote for what it is worth, is to remove the special case option for Old German 
and simply make it a recognized locale variant and langauge. 
 
My 2 cents, 
 
Kevin 
 

I fully agree with you in the long term but as mentioned earlier,
this would be a too big task for 1.1. Would a (temporary) solution
with the still existing special case option for German be a good
idea to be implemented before 1.1final or just forget about the old
orthoraphy support before 1.1final?

Hi, 
 
I have no idea how much work is needed to get MySpell to understand that option 
and to properly choose between various dictonaries based on it. 
 
I would rather hold out for the right solution here.  As it stands, a user of old German 
can in fact, simply use an unused locale for it as a workaround and then spellcheck 
in both new and old German inside the same document. 
 
I frankly think that special casing the option just for German was the wrong solution 
frm the beginning and one we should fix. 
 
But this is my 2 cents, it is not my decision to make but instead the deciion of the 
l10n project developers if they agree with us. 
 
Thanks, 
 
Kevin 
 

Reassigned to Falko as the responsible one for the component L10N.

FT: This issue needs more investigation but will not make it into 2.0

To avoid confusion, the non-functioning "german-spelling-old" option should be 
removed/hidden in OOo. Could this be done before OOo 2.0? Removing it won't 
solve the original problem, but users will only be confused about options that 
do nothing. 

not l10n, but lingucomponent issue.

*** Issue 40659 has been marked as a duplicate of this issue. ***

Actually there is no need to remove that checkbox, it could be made functional.

What needs to be done is: for German the dictionaries 'de_DE' AND 'de_DE_neu'
have to be installed. (As I understand the first one covers old orthography and
the second the new orthography.)
Then the MySpell/HunSpell implementation needs to choose the dictionary to use
according to the current state of that flag.

The value that is used for this checkbox can be found in the service
com.sun.star.linguistic2.LinguProperties and is named 'IsGermanPreReform'.

For a sample usage see the class PropertyHelper_Spell in
linguistic/inc/prophelp.hxx.
The function 'SetTmpPropVals' is used to override the globaly set values (in the
above mentioned service) that got stored in the helper class with the values
passed as last arguments to 'isValid' or 'spell' API function calls.

However since there is only a single OOo dictionary for German Switzerland
nothing similar can be done here.


And what still would be somewhat bad is that there are no different hyphenation
dictionaries for old and new German orthography. Same thing for the Thesaurus.
For both it is not even stated on the lingucomponent website if they are using
old or new orthography...


If one still likes to disable/remove the checkbox:
The code for the checkbox itself is in svx\source\options\optlingu.cxx just look
for 'EID_OLD_GERMAN' or 'sOldGerman'.

Adding myself to CC list.

FT: Re-assigned to requirement default user

a few things to correct:

- there are hyphenation patterns for old orthography. I converted the old LaTeX
patterns some time ago, they are here: http://j3e.de/myspell/

- in Swiss German old/new orthography are not so different as in non-Swiss
German but yes - it's also different ;-) As I made a old-orthography de_DE
dictionary, it would be easy to make a Swiss old orthography de_CH dictionary, too.

- as tl says, there is a simple way to check the state of the "old orthography"
checkbox. Laci - do you think it's possible for you to check that flag in
hunspell and use the defined dictionary + _old (e.g. de_DE_old.{aff,dic} instead
of de_DE in that case?

I will try to solve the problem, also for hyphenation.

Laci

We can't solve this for 2.0.2.

Please set target accordingly.

I think that - as already suggested - dictionaries for the pre-1996 orthography
need to be marked in some way (e.g. "_old", "_historic"), not the dictionaries
for the post-1996 orthography, as we presumedly want to keep the defaults.

However, if this feature is not going to be included very soon, which I don't
think it will, as it has been targetted to "later", I strongly suggest to remove
the "Alte deutsche Rechtschreibung" checkbox from the UI (even if it still could
be kept in the config files), because it suggests to the user the existance of a
non-existing functionality. Note that this checkbox is even dysfunctional in SO
since its version 8 (see #i67386#). Or should this be discussed in a separate issue?

TL->nemeth: The way to distinguish between using new or old German spelling up
to OOo 2.0 was the option named "German spelling - old" in
"Tools/Options/Language Settings/Writing Aids".
In the lingupropertyset is a property named "IsGermanPreReform" to get/set that
value.

What you need to do is to look at run-time what value this property has and
choose the specific dictionary accordingly. Also (if you not always want to
evaluate that flag) you need to establish a listener so if the property changes
you can switch the dictionary in use.
(If I'm not mistaken there is a different instance that triggers spell checking
again if that value changes thus you would not need to care about that.)

I hope I can solve it for 2.0.4.

The checkbox must be disabled, if there is no "_old" dictionary (or if I won't
be able to solve this issue).

I also prefer the "_old" method because it helps in the generalization of
handling alternative orthographies. For example, for French, the default
orthography could be a set of the old and new rules and the alternative
orthography must be only the new orthography:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reforms_of_French_orthography#Application)
So, instead of "German-spelling prereform", the title "Alternative orthography"
(and the file name extension "_alt") would be better.

Presumably for hyphenation also need a similar patch.

nemeth->TL: thanks for the instructions.

target 2.x.

SBA: As far as I know, in August 2006 the New German ortography was agrreed on
nationwide.
This "lowers" the need for a new-old German switch in my opinion.

However, the general need to switch dictionaries within one language seems to be
needed in Dutch and French (at least). I believe that there is many more
languages that need such a switch without "getting individual codes" from
whatever international authority.
 

My issue was just redirected here (81788 -> 67386).
The situation is that the new user (not me) prefers the old german orthography
and stumbled upon the non-functionality of the "use old german orthography"
checkbox.
Therefore, if it is non-functional, it should be removed/hidden independent on
this discussion (therefore my vote).
Next, one workaround could be that the old german orthography could be
downloaded from somewhere to substitute the OOo files. This way, the spell check
would be according to the OOo installation (or user? if user-file). Admittedly,
only a work around.

target 3.x (can't be fixed until code freeze)

there is an extension with the old spellin in German

so for me => works for me

no response so I do it myself

.