Apache OpenOffice (AOO) Bugzilla – Issue 39381
auto correction has unpractical defaults for the german language
Last modified: 2013-02-07 22:34:04 UTC
There are some options activated in the auto correction that doesn't really make sense. a) beginning a sentence with a capital letter: This annoys most German users especially as one has to take off this feature regularly again as it seems to be saved with the document and not with the OpenOffice-Options. Reason: The German language has very long words and in nearly all business and scientific words you regularly find abbreviations u.s.w./bzw./M.f.G./z.B. and so on. There is such a variety of abbreviations and sometimes the abbreviation is just a typical syllable of a long word that just cannot be on the ignore-list of OpenOffice. When entering words in fields of a table you also always get a capitalized word though you nearly don't have real sentences in fields of a table. Say you have a typical headline of a table and insert "relativ" and "absolut" you'll get an autocorrection. In the German language all substansives are written with a capital letter and when one is entering a text, one is specially concentrated on where to set capital letters anyway. I think there is no real need for this option in German. Couldn't we just set this feature to "off" for default in the German package? b) same as a) with German words with more than one capital letter. There is an ignore-list but it doesn't help a lot. Especially in Chart and Graph when one uses a lot of abbreviations of the form MSinteger, HGewicht, BMedium and so forth. This even works when the second capital is an index. It's annoyable when one first has to set this option off in the auto correction.
You can disable the auto-correction feature. This is an automatism that tries to help the user. The frequency of periods denoting a full stop sentence in the german language is in my opinion still higher than periods denoting abbreviations. So, if you are annoyed by this, just disable it in your profile.
I would also like to vote for the suggested change: Please make the default setting of the autocorrect checkbox "Start every sentence with a capital letter" OFF in the german language program version. I always turn it off anyway, as do most other Germans I know. It is far more nasty to have 20% of cases where OO definitly introduces a spelling error where you didn't make one (e.g. with abbreviations like "z.B.") compared to the rare chance that OO really corrects an unintentionally typed lower case letter at the beginning of a sentence (even assuming the full stop period signs are in the majority with 80%)!