Spell Check or find replace foreign language

[asherblake]

Hi. I’ve got a large document, and I want to change the few dozen Hebrew words to a different font.
I was thinking I could do a spell check and it would bring them up so I could change them manually,
but it looks like it’s not recognizing them as misspelled.
Could I use the find feature?
I was thinking I could type in the 22 letters of the alphabet until I found each Hebrew word,
but is that possible to do a word search in a foreign language?
How do I do that?
Any other ways? Maybe easier ways?

Thanks sincerely -

[ajlittoz]

2021-06-29 edit only removed a typo; nothing new

Multi-lingual documents are written comfortably if you configure adequately Writer and use consistently styles.

Activate Hebrew management in Tools>Options, Language Settings>Languages and select Hebrew in Complex Text Layout.

This will add a new item in LibreOffice Writer: Basic Fonts (Complex Text Layout) where you can choose a different font for Western and Hebrew text.

For this feature to work, your text should be correctly marked up. Basically, this means the Language attribute is set for the text words. I assume that your primary language is not Hebrew and it is correctly set in Language Settings>Languages.

For your Hebrew paragraphs, create a new paragraph style derived from Text Body where the only difference is Language in the Font tab. For Hebrew words in non-Hebrew paragraphs, create a new character style (call it Hebrew) where Language is set to Hebrew in Font tab.

Apply the paragraph styles as usual. When you have an Hebrew word in a non-Hebrew paragraph, apply character style Hebrew to it.

The font will be automatically set to what you defined in Basic Fonts (Complex Text Layout).

As usual, direct formatting (manual formatting) overrides styling. So reformat first your document with styles otherwise you’re doomed to continue to do everything manually. For introduction to styles, read the Writer Guide.

To show the community your question has been answered, click the ✓ next to the correct answer, and “upvote” by clicking on the ^ arrow of any helpful answers. These are the mechanisms for communicating the quality of the Q&A on this site. Thanks!

[asherblake]

Does anyone have any other ideas on this one?
I’ve already written the document, so it is not something I can fix by writing with different styles.
Thanks,
Asher

[ajlittoz]

This is no solution to your problem. You should have added it to your question as an edit or as a comment under it.

Please retype it so and delete your “non-answer” afterwards.

There is no concept of a conversation in a Question & Answer site like this one.

Contrary to your opinion, styles are your friends and will really help you formatting, and most importantly maintaining, your document. And they allow things which can’t be done with direct formatting.

[mikekaganski]

Indeed, even though you have already written your text, and you would use Find & Replace facility to find portions of text you need, you still would benefit from not applying some text attributes to the found portions directly, but instead take a few moments to prepare proper character styles to assign to the found pieces.

[mikekaganski]

Search for the regular expression

\p{script=Hebrew}+

[asherblake]

Hey Mike - THANKS so much! That worked wonders!

[Wanderer]

Use Find-and-replace and regular expressions. You can set a format for the replacment also.

However: I tried to copy hebrew letters in the search box and this worked well for single letters, but I could not compose a regular expression as the direction of writing seems to change in the search-box. So I used hex-coding for aleph and tav but used yod then as upper bound.

I tried to search ([\u05D0-\u05F2]*) and replace by $1 finds all groups of hebrew letters and replaces with themself self but it didn’t change to bold/12pt as commanded.

Therefore I used the above expression with search-all, this leaves all hebrew letters marked and can now just hit the button for bold etc (bad direct formatting, or even assign a special style to the selections.

Test what fits your need.

PS: Mike was quicker and I like his regular expression.

PPS Help on regular expressions

[asherblake]

Hey! Thanks so much Wanderer, between you and Mike, that worked wonders! Thank you.