Re: Illegal handling of Greek Characters in Speller (Office 2008)

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I didn't get any ? characters: I have all the Greek "characters" here. I
just can't read Greek :-)

If you use Send Feedback from the Help menu in any Office 2008 application,
you are talking directly to the Microsoft developers.

If you want me to speak to the developers for you, you need to provide
documented examples I can show them. If I say to them "Oh, anyone who can
read and write Greek can prove this!" they will say "OK. We'll wait until
they do."

I will be in Mac BU Redmond next month. If I have your examples, I can show
them to the person who designs the mechanism. If I don't, I can't.

Cheers

On 9/3/08 5:50 PM, in article C3F96A79.4CC1%tsalidis@xxxxxxxxxxxxx, "Office
2004 Test Drive User" <tsalidis@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Thanks for the try to help. The ? are the Greek characters I wrote to the
email but because you missing the fonts and language pack you cannot see
them. The problem described from a user perspective view. It is very easy to
be proved by anyone having the capability to write greek text.

Despite this I can prove it technically to Microsoft because I develop
spellers for MS Office and I can see what characters passed to speller from
all the MS Applications. Our speller is mixed English-Greek and I can see
that all English characters passed correctly to speller. Only greek
characters from Entourage and Excel that have this behaviour.

If you can help by passing this to Microsoft it will be perfect. The MS
Office 2008 for Mac has all the characteristics to be the best Office
Application for greek writing.


On 09/03/2008 1:26 ??, in article C3F96BD8.BC02%john@xxxxxxxxxxx, "John
McGhie" <john@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Well, I can't write Greek at all :-) So I am afraid that if you want us to
test this, you need to send me some correctly-spelled and capitalised Greek,
and dome that is not, and tell us which is which :-)

I suspect that ? gets special handling, because it is commonly-used in
English as a mathematical symbol.

It is entirely possible that you are correct: it's a bug. But we don't know
this, and unless we can research it and prove it, it will never be fixed
because Microsoft will never know about it.

Entourage has extra limitations: it can spell in only one language, and the
language is not marked in the text, it is set in the preferences.

Hope this helps


On 4/2/08 10:57 PM, in article
583d6565-a370-487c-ae47-45a6f3635e23@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx,
"tsalidis@xxxxxxxxx" <tsalidis@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:


Thanks for the try.

I am sure that this is a bug in these two apps. It is correct that the
language is applied to the whole doc but this is not the problem.
Try the following. Write a few greek words in an excel sheet (i hope
you can) like the ones in the list (????, ??? ????). Calling the
speller, the words containing greek letter pi (?) presented with only
the pi letter in the spell dialog. All other characters are missing.
The word with three pi (???) appears correctly. This means that excel
passes only pi from greek chars to the speller. If the greek word
contains two nonconsecutive pi then the speller presents the first as
unknown word and then the second as a different unknown word
considering the characters between the two pi as space chars. If
instead of greek chars you put english chars between two
nonconsecutive pi then the whole word is correctly passed to speller
and handled normally.
In Entourage not even the pi is passed to speller. Greek chars
considered as empty space.


On 4 ???, 13:05, John McGhie <j...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
No "Help", but I can tell you why...

Word and PowerPoint switch "languages" in the text when you switch
keyboards.  So the text you type from he Greek keyboard is marked with the
Greek language and spelled in Greek.

Entourage and Excel do not support multiple text languages, and they do not
mark the language of the text in the text stream.  The language you specify
in the preferences for those applications applies to the whole file.

It doesn't help, but at least you now know why...

On 4/02/08 4:15 AM, in article
b5f64603-4014-4ba2-be9f-946023801...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx,



"tsali...@xxxxxxxxx" <tsali...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Hi

I want to use a custom dictionary with Greek words from all the Office
applications. Word & Power Point use it properly, meaning that they
correctly recognize the words in the custom dictionary signifying all
other words as erroneous.
Unfortunately Entourage and Excel does not handle Greek characters
properly. They did not pass greek words to speller. Excel passes only
the greek character pi while Entourage ignores all greek characters.
It seems that these apps filter out greek characters and does not send
them to apps. Thesaurus seems that is handling greek characters
correctly in all apps.

Any idea or help?

--
Don't wait for your answer, click here:http://www.word.mvps.org/

Please reply in the group.  Please do NOT email me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie, Consultant Technical Writer
McGhie Information Engineering Pty Ltdhttp://jgmcghie.fastmail.com.au/
Nhulunbuy, Northern Territory, Australia
+61 4 1209 1410, mailto:j...@xxxxxxxxxxx



--
Don't wait for your answer, click here: http://www.word.mvps.org/

Please reply in the group. Please do NOT email me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie, Consultant Technical Writer
McGhie Information Engineering Pty Ltd
http://jgmcghie.fastmail.com.au/
Sydney, Australia. S33°53'34.20 E151°14'54.50
+61 4 1209 1410, mailto:john@xxxxxxxxxxx

.

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