TechNote

Acrobat.com: Buzzword Support for Non-US English Languages

What's Covered

• Fonts
• Dictionaries for Spell Check
• Custom Words Lists
• Current Dictionary Support

This document addresses the degree to which Buzzword supports non-US English languages in its use of fonts and dictionaries used for spell check. "Unicode support in Buzzword (Acrobat.com)" (TechNote kb403224) contains additional information about Buzzword and Unicode support.

 

There are native language versions of Buzzword for English (US and UK), French and German. These versions have translated the user interface, dialogs, error messages as well as automatic settings for page size, dictionary and other locale specific settings. These are based on the language selected during sign up, as well as settings in each user's browser that pertain to country. Users can set or change the language choice on the sign in page or by selecting Settings & Preferences in the Buzzword menu in the upper left hand corner of the Buzzword browser window.

 

Fonts

 

Buzzword adheres to the Unicode standard, where characters are defined with 16 bits, resulting in a total of over 65,000 possible characters. However, unlike most desktop software, Buzzword must use "embedded fonts." This means that Buzzword can't read fonts from a user's computer, but instead must download the fonts it uses from the server.

Each font family contains instructions for some portion of the 65,000 possible characters. Buzzword must load each character that it makes available, so in order to expedite the time required to launch Buzzword, we limited the number of available characters to those used in Western European languages which correspond to the character set known as "Latin-1."

Buzzword currently supports neither right-to-left nor vertical composition languages.

Longer term, Buzzword will handle fonts differently by downloading characters dynamically, based on the document's contents and a user's settings.

 

Dictionaries for Spell Check

 

Buzzword allows users to select among 19 Western European language dictionaries (full list shown below).

When you create a new document, Buzzword uses your default language, if you've selected one. (See notes above for information on English, French or German language versions.) You can select a spell check dictionary that is different than the language of the user interface. To set your default language dictionary, go to the Document menu and choose Spell Check Language. Existing documents use US English until the user explicitly changes that document's dictionary.

Buzzword displays the number of words flagged as misspelled in the lower right portion of the screen. You may also choose your document's language by hovering over this indicator and clicking on the current document language. However, if no words are flagged as misspelled in your document, then this indicator is not available.

A document can use only one language dictionary at a time. If a portion of a document is written in a second language, you may temporarily switch the document's dictionary to check that section of the document. 

 

Custom Word Lists

There are two custom word lists in Buzzword:

• User word lists: Each user has a word list, so users can override a word that is marked as misspelled. These words are stored in a custom list that can be viewed and edited under Settings & Preferences. This custom word list remains in effect even when changing language dictionaries.
• Document word lists: Each Buzzword document also has its own custom word list, consisting of words that are acceptable only in that document. These document-based word lists cannot be viewed or edited. If the document's language changes, the document's custom word list continues to be used without modification.

Current Dictionary Support

Below is the list of languages for which Buzzword currently offers a spell check dictionary:

• Danish
• Dutch
• English (Canada)
• English (U.K.)
• English (U.S.)
• Finnish
• French (France)
• French (Canada)
• German
• German (Reformed)
• German (Swiss)
• German (Swiss, Reformed)
• Italian
• Norwegian (BokmÃ¥l)
• Norwegian (Nynorsk)
• Portuguese (Brazil)
• Portuguese (Portugal)
• Spanish
• Swedish

Buzzword will add more language dictionaries over time as we obtain licenses for additional word lists.

Search Support

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