LibreOffice spell-chek with custom sanskrit terminology dictionary in english / multi-language document not working

Omk · March 13, 2025, 11:12am

I am frequently working on documents written in english or finnish language, while having terminology in sanskrit (using IAST sanskrit transliteration). I have created a custom dictionary “Sanskrit IAST.dic” with the sanskrit terminology. When navigating Tools/Options/Language & Locales/Writing Aids/User Defined Dictionaries, the “Sanskrit IAST.dic” file is visible, and by clicking “Edit” the dictionary corrently opens for editing.

When I have my document open, and if I have selected the document language as “English (USA)” or “Finnish” and run the spell check, it will not use the “Sanskrit IAST” dictionary, but underline the sanskrit words with the red wavy underlining indicating that as per “English (USA)” dictionary, the word is misspelled. If I right-click the word to see spelling suggestions, it will display them from the “English (USA)” dictionary, completely ignoring my custom “Sanskrit IAST” dictionary.

Then I tried select all (Ctrl+a), Character/Font/Language to [none], then all the red wavy underlines disappear, and there are no spelling suggestions at all.

It seems that either I can’t comprehend how to make this working - or, this function is broken. Is this the inteded behavior?

How can I get it to spell-check my sanskrit terms in english language or finnish language document? Should I instead copy all the sanskrit terms to “standard.dic”?

Version: 24.2.7.2 (X86_64) / LibreOffice Community Build ID: 420(Build:2) CPU threads: 4; OS: Linux 6.8; UI render: default; VCL: gtk3 Locale: fi-FI (fi_FI.UTF-8); UI: fi-FI Ubuntu package version: 4:24.2.7-0ubuntu0.24.04.3 Calc: threaded

EarnestAl · March 14, 2025, 3:06am

Create a paragraph style and a character style with language set as Sanskrit. Apply the paragraph or character style to the Sanskrit parts of the documents depending on whether they are paragraphs or within a paragraph.

Similar to this example where a new paragraph style Text Body Latin is being set up to have Latin as its language.

Omk · March 14, 2025, 4:59am

Thank you for these suggestions. However, what you suggest doesn’t work: LO does not have Sanskrit available as a language. And it doesn’t seem possible to add a custom language.

Secondly, the document is written in Finnish or English, and I need spell check to be active for those languages. It is only particular Sanskrit terminology which is being used throughout the entire Finnish or English document. In the same way as a doctor would be writing a scientific medical article in English, but would be using medical terminology in Latin in it.

I would like to have the paragraph language / paragraph style / character language / style set to the actual language, in which the document is written, and then have the terminology dictionary activated for spell-checking the specific Sanskrit terms within it. Seems that it is not doable?

So am I right to conclude, that this is not possible in LO? Is it that LO does not support documents/paragraphs written in two or more languages? It has to be either one or the other? And LO does not support Sanskrit as a language?

Some work seem to have been completed towards adding Sanskrit to LO:

Wanderer · March 14, 2025, 5:54am

No, but your intended way of use is different from the idea LO uses.
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For your way to use you would not create a dictionary for sanskrit, bu an secondary dictionary “my-english-extension-sanskrit” like we do for special terminology. You would also need to copy this data to an identical “my-finnish-extension-sanskrit”. LO will not “know” this parts are sanskrit when you use this way.
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LibreOffice works the other way round: You mark text as being in a certain language. The usual place to set this is a paragraph style, and together with a direction for the style to used next one can quite easily switch between languages. The spell-checker will use the according dictionary, if it is installed/found. What is needed for this is only a code to define the language (like en-us, en-uk etc), but I read this exists even for clingon language from Star Trek.
Edit: Use character-styles when there are single words/sentences inside a paragraph.
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Advantages:

You only need one sanskrit dictionary usable from english and finnish documents. (But you may still need sanskrit traditional and “modern”).
One can also set the Language to “none” to prevent spell check from checking text. (Example: When you show wrrite papers on md5 or sha-checksums or cryptology.)
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What you found there is on the translation of the user-interface. But I guess you don’t need your menus in sanskrit as used in india, sa-in.

Check this extensions:
https://updateexte-arm.libreoffice.org/de/extensions/show/27509