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Comment by _whoDis | Hacker News Reader

When you work in multi language environment the squiggles are often less than useful. They are just visual noise I must fight or ignore because the system tries to guess the language of the text I'm writing and it is most often wrong. And manually switching language settings between each interaction is way to inconvenient.

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I used character styles that set the proofing language with hot keys assigned, so shift-alt-1 sets to English, shift-alt-2 to German, etc. As character styles they apply both to the current insertion point when typing or any selected range (e.g. when I forgot to set it proactively and now have a line spattered with wiggles)

Or just set the proofing language for the entire text to None to banish all spelling and grammar diagnostics.

I didn't know you could do that, although one of the languages I write in (Gaelic) is not really supported at least in Office 365 at all.

Meine Deutsch ist so schlecht, MS Word hat gar nichts Ahnung wie das auseinanderfutzeln kann.

    s|Meine|Mein| # Gender mismatch
    s|nichts|keine|
    s|wie das|wie es|

Just fyi.

    s|Meine|Mein| # Gender mismatch
    s|nichts|keine|
    s|wie das|wie es das|

Just fyi.

    s|Meine|Mein| # Gender mismatch
    s|nichts|keine| # wrong wordclass
    s|wie das|wie es das| # missing subject in subclause

Just fyi.

Thanks :-) I did say my German is pretty bad.

Annoyingly when I get stuck in German I lapse into Gaelic rather than English, which is generally even less helpful.

Also I hear and see "gar nichts" used as part of a sentence but not "gar keine" especially if you're saying "I have no idea about that", can you point to something that explains that for me?

> I did say my German is pretty bad.

Yeah, but probably still better than 90% of the world population. Keep it up.

> Also I hear and see "gar nichts" used as part of a sentence but not "gar keine" especially if you're saying "I have no idea about that", can you point to something that explains that for me?

"Nichts" means nothing. You don't say "I have nothing idea about that.", you need an adjective there, not a noun. "gar nichts" is "Nothing at all", "gar keine ..." is "No ... at all". You could say "Word hat ein Nichts an Ahnung": "Word has a nothing of knowledge" (That sounds wrong in English.), but that would be rather poetic and not expected in normal text.

> but not "gar keine" especially if you're saying "I have no idea about that"

I don't know, what you mean there, without context, I would translate "I have no idea about that" as "Davon hab' ich keine Ahnung.".

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I am sorry for the spam, I was in a area with bad connectivity. Actually I am surprised the POST request got through at all, because the network connection never got established and the received reported 0.

That's not a problem with the squiggles as a user interface, but with the software assuming that you speak only one language.

It's very odd to me how at my work's MS Dynamic 365 interface American-English spellings are red-underlined while British is not (e.g. color/gray but not colour/grey are underlined). The company is American-based and there are no dialect/country selections available.

On most systems I use I've managed to set it up so that I get spell checking in all languages I use. So I only get a red line if it's not a valid word in any of the languages, which is pretty useful.

At least in Firefox I can select multiple dictionaries. Firefox will ignore words that are a match in any of those languages, at the cost ofc, of typos that are in one language but not another so sometimes I'll right click and uncheck a language temporarily.

In firefox I downloaded dictionaries for all the languages I need. Of course at work microsoft outlook thinks it knows best and underlines every single word in my emails because I don't write them in the same language the UI is set to. Great help!

While your point is valid, I think you are missing the point of the article.

The point was that someone the author was fond of passed away. The author who likely might be reading these comments. And Krueger did some cool stuff that everyone use without realizing who did it.

Yes, I have the same problem. Some programs handle this better than others. The Affinity suite is esp. bad.

You can disable language checks under the paragraph or character tab for the text item (I forget which). A little annoying but at least makes them go away.

Oh yeah - typical American thinking behind it. Everybody knows English and only uses one language.

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