Write usually german. Have a crazy project just for fun, write a story in german with english spoken text. For excample: Er rief: “Don’t!” It’s one paragraph, so set paragraph styles doesn’t work. It would work for a whole paragraph, but not in that case, cause not the whole paragraph is in the same language. Don’t have a need to change keyboard style, because english doesn’t need letters in german doesn’t exist. Tried to make a button in toolbar, but there’s not any commend to change language in that customize dialog. Even not for menu bar, although, there’s an entry. So I thought about macros, too, instead of navigate through the menu for every english sentence, but it didn’t work. The macros I made were completely empty. Searching still for a shortcut by menu buttons or hot keys. Use this days LibreOffice Writer (and Calc, by the way) 7.0.5.2.
In Writer, language is an attribute either of a paragraph style or a character style. What you need is specific styles.
As you are writing a story, I think there are not many paragraph styles involved. Of course, you have Text Body and perhaps a few Heading n for chapter titles.
Basically, you Text Body is tagged German in its Font tab. Create a new paragraph style German Text Body (or any name meaningful to you) derived from Text Body(i.e. right-click on Text Body name in the side stylepane and New) where the only attribute you set is Language German.
By doing so, all other attributes remains synchronised with those of Text Body so that if you modify this latter style the modifications are automatically forwrded to German Text Body. Your formatting is always consistent.
For intra-paragraph language switch, it is barely more complicated. Create two character styles: German for use inside English paragraphs and English to use inside German paragraphs. You only set Language to the desired language in Font tab.
When in an English (resp. German) paragraph you need to write words in the other language, select German (resp. English) character style. At end of the sequence, reset default language with Default Character Style. Don’t use the English (resp. German) character style because this will not revert to the default setting.
In case you emphasize words with bold or italics, this is usually done with Strong Emphasis or Emphasis character styles respectively. Unfortunately, you can’t presently apply two character styles. This means you must duplicate these styles to attach a language to them.
Your question asks also for keyboard shortcuts so that you don’t need to grab the mouse and come back to the keyboard.
Text Body is already atttached to Ctrl+0 (zero).
You can assign keyboard shortcuts to any style through Tools>Customize, Keyboard tab, category Styles.
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I had problems with character styles before, but now I found out I even can make a button to reach it. I’ll try it.
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Use the more link in your “non-answer” (only you, as owner of the answer) can see it. “Repost as a comment”. Thanks.