Apache OpenOffice Community Forum

I’ve been an OpenOffice user for many years but over the last few years have considered moving to LibreOffice a number of times.

Each time I see news about something new in LibreOffice which I'd benefit from, or find something I can't do in OpenOffice I look again. Now I can't find specific mention of the language limitation which held me back in the past, nor clear information saying it's been addressed.

The last time I looked into this (a few years ago), a single installation of LibreOffice would not allow the UI language to change per user. Is this still a limitation? I'd like the UI language to default to the language used for the system UI for the user logged in and have the ability to override that setting per user.

Of course, each user can have its own UI langauge. This has always been a feature in OpenOffice.
User = User logged in at your system. Each use has her/his own profile folder ~/Library/Application Support/OpenOffice/4 where the user's settings and preferences are stored.

You have to install one language pack for each language that should be selectable by each user. 5 langauges means that you have to add 4 language packs in addition to the installed language version. The language packs are added to the installation folder so the language is availlable to all users.

Villeroy wrote:This has always been a feature in OpenOffice.

Thanks for the reply but it was LibreOffice which was unclear. In the past I saw information saying that it was not possible with LibreOffice and that (unlike OpenOffice) a full installation for each language was needed to change the UI. That was the main reason I haven't migrated to LibreOffice. I already have a multi-language setup for OpenOffice.

Works for me on Linux with LO 6, LO 7.2 and 2 different languages (English with German language pack) for 2 different user accounts.

Thank you for the confirmation.

I will give it a go.

... 30 minutes later

Installed. Two language packs installed and preferences set differently for two users.

I had no problems although there were a couple of unexpected changes to parameters I didn't touch. For example I set the Asian default document language to Japanese before installing a language pack. After installing a language pack for English (UK) I found the Asian language had changed to Chinese. I changed it back and installed the Japanese language pack as well. That triggered another change, this time in the default western document language. I don't know why these changes happened but as I spotted them and changed them back there's no problem. I now have one user with an English interface and another with Japanese and no problems yet.