[Lexicog] Spellchecking Unicode in MS-Office

[Benjamin Barrett]

I was surprised at the claim that Word is MS is knowledgeable about  
internationalization. While they have grudgingly gotten better over  
the years (I started using Microsoft software with Windows 3.1  
Japanese), the last I checked, Explorer still could not handle all of  
the characters in Lushootseed, the language local to Redmond,  
Washington! My complaint about this on Microsoft's forum went  
unanswered.

Fighting the spell checker, fonts, language settings and other Windows  
and Office settings is a problem I encounter on a day-to-day basis as  
I frequently deal with files in Japanese and other languages. Moreover  
to this day, there are characters that cannot be replaced in Word  
search and replace. I have learned to be aggressive in searching and  
replacing those manually.

Of course the two-letter language codes that Windows offers cannot  
handle the nearly 7000 languages in the world, so I seriously doubt  
that Lakota is a possibility.

My suggestion is to do a search and replace on h-caron, replacing h- 
caron (no formatting) with h-caron language set to do not spell check.  
I don't know if that's a possibility, but it's probably your best bet.

Benjamin Barrett

On Nov 14, 2008, at 2:06 PM, Mike Maxwell wrote:

> Jan F. Ullrich wrote:
> > We found out that the character is recognized when we associate the
> > text with a different language for spellchecking, for instance
> > French, but then other characters are not recognized. If we keep the
> > text assigned to English spellchecking (which is desired) then it is
> > only h-caron that is not recognized.
>
> The first question I would ask is, why associate Lakota text with
> English? I assume by this you mean that Word thinks the Lakota text is
> English, but you have somehow substituted another spell checker (else
> all the words in the text would have red underlines).
>
> I'm not sure what the method is to tell Word (and the other MsOffice
> products) that there is a language called Lakota, but there must be  
> one
> (since Ms is very involved in and knowledgeable about
> internationalization). And presumably that is where you define the
> word-forming characters of the language.
>
> This is probably not the right forum to ask that kind of question. I
> would go to Google groups and look for "groups" that address
> internationalization (there's an abbreviation, something like in8ion)
> and/or MsOffice. Also search Microsoft's website for
> "internationalization".
>
> Mike Maxwell
> CASL/ U MD
>


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