I use LibreOffice on Linux and sometimes have to proofread .docx
files for a friend.
These files are written in German, but they are created on a Windows computer where the default setting is Arabic.
They are also formatted in an untolerable way (on the lines of all bold and 20 pt).
The following does not depend on whether I first convert the .docx
to .odt
or not.
In the document as I receive it, the formatting is garbage, but the text flow is actually correct.
When I select all text and click Clear formatting
, the text flow is changed to right-to-left, and periods go to the left as well.
++++++++. This is how it looks
This is how it should look.++++
I assumed this was because the document language is Arabic, so I tried to change the document’s language from the status bar, but that only affects spellchecking. Then I wanted to change the language to German or English in Options → Language Settings → Languages, but it was already set to German!
However, it says in Format → Page → Organizer:
Contains: … + Text direction right-to-left (horizontal) + Page description: Arabic …
I do not know why these settings are there, as they are not set in the options.
It’s possible to manually change the text flow to left-to-right in Format → paragraph → Alignment, but this is very superficial: pressing the end
key will position the cursor on the (left) beginning of the line, while the pos1
key will position it on the (right) end of the line.
Also, choosing Clear formatting
afterwards reverts this manual setting.
The only way to fix these formatting issues seems to be to first save the document as a .txt
file to lose all meta information, then reopen it and save it as .odt
.
This can’t be the only way, though.
How can I really change the document’s language?
I looked for answers on www.ask.libreoffice.org but couldn’t find a solution there. These links are on similar topics, but didn’t provide a working solution to this case:
https://ask.libreoffice.org/en/question/7269/how-to-change-language-in-whole-document/
https://help.libreoffice.org/Common/Selecting_the_Document_Language