RESOLVED: Open Office spell checker won't accept non-english languages

[joneall]

I have installed French on my computer (system in English). I have an Open Office document in French and I have set the language to French(France) in Tools > Language for all the text. Yet when I go into the spelling checker, I can pick French as the text language in the drop-down box until my few remaining hairs fall out. As soon as I let go of the mouse button the text returns resolutely to English. Of course, almost every word is underlined with wavy red lines. (Secondary question: How do I turn those off?)

In OO > Tools > Options > Language settings > Languages, there seems to be a whole bunch of things clicked, including Australian English and Belgian French, neither of which I want. Apparently these are the languages I am supposedly able to pick as text languages.

Help, please.

[peterroots]

Re: Open Office spell checker won't accept non-english languages

have you installed the french dictionary in OpenOffice? If french french does not appear with a tick in the languages section then probably you don't have the dictionary.
Wiggley red - turn off auto spell check (there is an icon on the tool bar)

[joneall]

Re: Open Office spell checker won't accept non-english languages

have you installed the french dictionary in OpenOffice? If french french does not appear with a tick in the languages section then probably you don't have the dictionary.

I have installed French in Linux. Do you have to specifically install it a second time for Open Office? That would be silly.

Strangely, when I open a document in English, clicking on Tools > Language does not give me the choice of "For selection", "For paragraph", etc. to which to apply a language choice. But when I open a document in French, it does.

In the spelling checker for the French document, the "Text language" drop-down at the top contains selections for all sorts of French (as well as all sorts of English). But as soon as I click on, say "French(France)", the drop-down goes right back to English(USA).

Just to see what would happen, I clicked to download "Modern French" again. So it saved an oxt file to my hard disk. What would I have to do now? Instructions are remarkable by their absence.

I find all this quite strange.

[joneall]

Re: Open Office spell checker won't accept non-english languages

Found it! I had to go into Tools > Options > Language Settings > Languages and change the default language for the document. Why the ^&*( didn't using the Tools Language work? It's always easier to do a thing like that rather than going and changing the options.

Oh, well, at least I see what to do now.

Thanks for your help.