Unicode Explained

When you set the text of language in a word processor, the effect depends on the extent

of support for that language in the program. Perhaps the program simply records the

information about language without using it in any way. It might still pass the infor-

mation forward when the text is transferred to another program. Moreover, other ver-

sions of the program might use the information in a useful way. Support to a language

might consist of some simple operations on punctuation marks, as described earlier. It

might also include a spellchecker, grammar checker, style checker, readability checker,

synonym dictionary, etc.

If you set the language and see something useful happening (e.g., quotation marks

turning to chevrons when the language has been set to French), the program might still

fail to do any spellchecks, even if you have enabled checking in general. The software

might lack a spelling dictionary and other spelling support for a language. An easy way

to check this is to write something nonsensical, like qffqgfq, and see whether the pro-

gram flags it as an error.

Determining the language of text

A word processor could deduce the language of a document or a fragment of a docu-

ment in different ways. In particular, MS Word uses the following techniques:

Heuristic recognition

MS Word analyzes the text and deduces the language by statistical analysis. This

feature can be disabled, though. ...