LibreOffice Writer occasionally loses Language attribute that is applied to some words and phrases

English
#1

I’m writing a document (in English) which includes a number of French and German phrases and I don’t want those to get flagged as English spelling mistakes, so I’ve highlighted each one and done a Tools | Language | For Selection and chosen German or French. This attribute gets saved in the document and is there next time I reopen the document. If I do a spell check, the German words don’t get flagged as spelling errors in English (indeed they get spellchecked as German).

But… something is occasionally causing all those Language attributes to be lost and everything to revert to the default Language (English UK, in my case). I wish I could find out what causes it to happen occasionally. Any suggestions?

This is LibreOffice 7.6.4 64-bit on Windows 7. I’m saving as .doc, as opposed to .docx or.odt. Is that relevant?

#2

Every time you open your document it gets converted to LibreOffice native format, .odt; when you save it gets converted to .doc. There is not an exact conversion, especially as .doc has only rudimentary capability for styles. The more save, the more inexact conversions.

Always save in native format. If you need to give somebody else a copy and they can’t read it (Microsoft claims to be able to read .odt) then Save a Copy and send them that copy.

If you are working with somebody, or a team, on the same document then you should all use the exact same software. Software version is more important in Microsoft products too.

As you are saving in .doc format, then character styles won’t be saved so you cannot easily fix the problem of loss of language attribute. I suggest to read the chapter on styles in the Writer Guide (download from Documentation - The Document Foundation Wiki) and consider if using styles isn’t the way forward. It would be best to paste the entire document as unformatted text into a new document and style everything afresh.

#3

Ah, OK. It’s easy enough for me to save the master version in ODT. I hadn’t realised that LibreOffice’s support for the genuine Microsoft formats .doc and .docx wasn’t perfect. I suppose I should have heeded the warning that I get whenever I open a .doc and first save it as .doc! Sounds as if the miracle is that language attribute worked at all.

I’ll see how good Word is at reading .odt, in case I ever need to open the file in Word.

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