Problem with hyphenation in Word 2004

[Guest]

(I initially posted this to microsoft.public.word.mac, not realizing
that this has to be a better group.)

Greetings!

I am running Word 2004 under OS X 10.3.4. We use it for mixed language
scholarly writing, e.g., English text with Polish or Czech interspersed.
When we try to hyphenate a document (and this happens over and over),
hyphenation quits, sometimes with no message other than to say it has to
quit, sometimes complaining about there being no Czech hyphenation
module (for example). A solution for our purposes would be to convince
Word that we are hyphenating according to English rules, even if there
are some Czech words along the way, or to totally disable its awareness
of what languages are included in the document.

Any suggestions or workarounds? This is a big nuisance.

George Fowler
gfowler AT indiana DOT edu

 

[Andreas Prilop]

A solution for our purposes would be to convince
Word that we are hyphenating according to English rules, even if there
are some Czech words along the way,

Then select the whole text and set the language to English. (Don't know
where you find that in the menus, though.)

 

[Dayo Mitchell]

Then select the whole text and set the language to English. (Don't know
where you find that in the menus, though.)

It's under Tools | Language.

(or if you are using styles, you can click on Format | Style, Modify, and
use the Format drop down menu to set the language associated with the style
as English)

Is Word spell-checking Czech and Polish for you? If Word 2004 has that
ability (I suspect it doesn't?) you would lose it if the language is set to
English. But I suspect it's a moot point.

Actually, you could also investigate what happens with hyphenation if you
set the Czech/Polish text to "no proofing" (that is, no language
association at all). Then Word won't red-underline all your foreign words.
Presumably it won't try to hyphenate them either. This should, like you
say, disable Word's language awareness.

I don't use foreign languages much, but presume there is a good reason for
actually hyphenating instead of letting the words break at the spaces....

DM

 

[Thomas Fischer]

Dear George,

I am afraid that this is a serious bug in Word X / Word 2004.

I use large bodies of text with German and English parts, and if I use
auto-hyphenation, this will bring Word to a screeching halt, provided there
are sufficiently many switches from one language to the other in the text.

What is actually happening is that Word opens as many copies of the
hyphenation dictionary as possible until it hits the limit of the operating
system. So I may have some 250 copies of each of the German hyphenation
dictionaries open (old and post-refom) before Word complains that it can't
find any more (can be English hyphenation as well). In this situation, Word
usually will not be able to save the work anymore - a very serious
additional problem, which some times may be overcome by switching of
hyphenation.

If you want to see if your problem is the same, open a Terminal window and
type "lsof" (list open files) at the prompt.
If there are too many files open so see anything, type
lsof | grep hyph
to filter out only the file names containing "hyph" (you can try "Hyph" or
"Microsoft" instead of "hyph" if you want to).

I was hoping that this would be fixed with Word 2004, but my test drive
today showed otherwise.
This makes it essentially impossible to write a book with foreign language
quotes using Word (this would be almost any scientific book in German).
The point is, if you have 400+ pages, you should not hyphenate by hand, and
if if you hyphenate automatically, you better obey the rules of the given
language.

Best regards
Thomas Fischer

 

[Beth Rosengard]

Hi Thomas,

This sounds analogous to the Disk Full error (if you're curious, it's here:
<http://word.mvps.org/MacWordNew/DiskFullError.htm>) and I'll escalate it to
MS. Another workaround when using auto-hyphenation should be to remember to
close the document periodically (and perhaps quit Word as well) to force it
to delete its temporary files of the hyphenation dictionary.

--
Beth Rosengard
Mac MVP

Mac Word FAQ: <http://word.mvps.org/MacWordNew/index.htm>
Entourage Help Page: <http://www.entourage.mvps.org>

 

[Thomas Fischer]

Hello Beth,

thank you for the advice.

Although my situation is a little bit different, I checked the proposed
workarounds. Unfortunately, they don't do anything in my situation.
Specifically:
- If I work in Normal view my problem is solved in so far as there is no
hyphenation happening - but this is obviously not what I want.
- I can install the FixDiskFullIssue.dot, but the script will not close the
Hyphenation Dictionaries. It work fine otherwise as far as I see. But if I
have sufficiently many language changes in my document I can't even open it
because the system will not allow an additional file.

On the brighter side, this bug is much more specific than the Disk Full
error. The symptoms are the same, because the underlying problem is
identical: too many files open for the system to handle. But in my case,
this is *always the same file opened over and over again*.

Further more, this seems to be specific to the German (and Polish or Czech?)
hyphenation, it doesn't seem to occur in English/French. (There was an
update for French and/or Italian, I think.) Looking at the list of open
files, the English and French spelling tools seem not to stay open - I only
get a US English Spelling Dictionary, although there is no American English
in the text, only British. But neither the English Hyphenation nor the
English Spelling appear in the list.

Strangely, if I choose to use the German post-refom rules, the system will
open the Pre-reform hyphenation as well (German Hyph Dict (post-reform) and
German Hyph Dict (pre-reform))

If this is useful in any way, I can present a short document (about 80 kb,
14 pages, 4kb compressed) full of meaningless German and English sentences
that will exhibit the problem on my system (OS 10.3.4, Office X).

All the best
Thomas

 

[Beth Rosengard]

Hi Thomas,

Sorry! I didn't mean to suggest that the workarounds for the Disk Full
error might work for your hyphenation error. Of course they wouldn't. I
was just pointing out a similarity. The only workaround I mentioned that
might help is closing the document and/or quitting Word periodically.

Anyway, I've reported this to MS and will append the additional information
you've given below. If they need your document, they'll get in touch but it
could be a while before we hear anything.

--
Beth Rosengard
Mac MVP

Mac Word FAQ: <http://word.mvps.org/MacWordNew/index.htm>
Entourage Help Page: <http://www.entourage.mvps.org>