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#1
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How to find a non-English shape that contains no text
Sounds weird, doesn't it?
My users wanted a macro that would arbitrarily set the language to English for every hunk of text in a presentation. That works fine. But after they run the macro and do a spell check, they occasionally get a whine from the PowerPoint spell checker that it doesn't have the Japanese (or Spanish, or German ...) dictionary available. They then ask me, "Hey - since you changed all the text to Emglish, how come it's whining about non-English dictionaries?" After investigating, I find that the cause of this is shapes that have been created with a language specified, but for one reason or another contain no text. (You can do this yourself rather easily: insert a textbox, select it, and specify some language (not English). Look at the bottom of the screen and you'll see that the langauge for that textbox has been set to whatever language you selected. However, the shape has no textframe ro text.) I can't find any way to detect such shapes. Since they don't contain text, there's no text frame, and since there's no textframe, there's no textrange, and therefore I can't check the languageID. I'm sure I'm missing something elemental - can somebody provide me with the secret? Thanks! |
#2
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How to find a non-English shape that contains no text
Although it may sound weird, I suspect this has something to do with
PowerPoint's accessibility. For a screen reader every autoshape has the potential to have 3 different types of text: A description of the shape (for example: oval) Web text (also known as alt-text) and the text within the shape A screen reader will read only one of the text items in the following priority: Text in the Shape Web Text Shape Description So, you see, there is always text associated with the shape, even if you can't see it because a blind person needs to hear it. I really suck at VB, but my friend wrote PowerTalk and he's into OpenSource, so I bet he might be able to help. Especially if you guys came up with an easy translator for PowerPoint presentations. Accessiblity isn't only about persons with physical challenges, it's about making electronic information available to as many as possible. :-) See: http://fullmeasure.co.uk/PowerTalk/ReadMe.htm -- Thanks, Glenna Shaw Microsoft PowerPoint MVP Team http://www.pptmagic.com " wrote: Sounds weird, doesn't it? My users wanted a macro that would arbitrarily set the language to English for every hunk of text in a presentation. That works fine. But after they run the macro and do a spell check, they occasionally get a whine from the PowerPoint spell checker that it doesn't have the Japanese (or Spanish, or German ...) dictionary available. They then ask me, "Hey - since you changed all the text to Emglish, how come it's whining about non-English dictionaries?" After investigating, I find that the cause of this is shapes that have been created with a language specified, but for one reason or another contain no text. (You can do this yourself rather easily: insert a textbox, select it, and specify some language (not English). Look at the bottom of the screen and you'll see that the langauge for that textbox has been set to whatever language you selected. However, the shape has no textframe ro text.) I can't find any way to detect such shapes. Since they don't contain text, there's no text frame, and since there's no textframe, there's no textrange, and therefore I can't check the languageID. I'm sure I'm missing something elemental - can somebody provide me with the secret? Thanks! |
#3
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How to find a non-English shape that contains no text
On Mar 15, 9:20 pm, PPTMagician
wrote: Although it may sound weird, I suspect this has something to do with PowerPoint's accessibility. For a screen reader every autoshape has the potential to have 3 different types of text: A description of theshape(for example: oval) Web text (also known as alt-text) and the text within theshape A screen reader will read only one of the text items in the following priority: Text in theShape Web TextShapeDescription So, you see, there is always text associated with theshape, even if you can't see it because a blind person needs to hear it. I really suck at VB, but my friend wrote PowerTalk and he's into OpenSource, so I bet he might be able to help. Especially if you guys came up with an easy translator for PowerPoint presentations. Accessiblity isn't only about persons with physical challenges, it's about making electronic information available to as many as possible. :-) See:http://fullmeasure.co.uk/PowerTalk/ReadMe.htm -- Thanks, Glenna Shaw Microsoft PowerPoint MVP Teamhttp://www.pptmagic.com " wrote: Sounds weird, doesn't it? My users wanted a macro that would arbitrarily set thelanguageto English for every hunk of text in a presentation. That works fine. But after they run the macro and do a spell check, they occasionally get a whine from the PowerPoint spell checker that it doesn't have the Japanese (or Spanish, or German ...) dictionary available. They then ask me, "Hey - since you changed all the text to Emglish, how come it's whining about non-English dictionaries?" After investigating, I find that the cause of this is shapes that have been created with alanguagespecified, but for one reason or another contain no text. (You can do this yourself rather easily: insert a textbox, select it, and specify somelanguage(not English). Look at the bottom of the screen and you'll see that the langauge for that textbox has been set to whateverlanguageyou selected. However, the shapehas no textframe ro text.) I can't find any way to detect such shapes. Since they don't contain text, there's no text frame, and since there's no textframe, there's no textrange, and therefore I can't check the languageID. I'm sure I'm missing something elemental - can somebody provide me with the secret? Thanks!- Hide quoted text - - Show quoted text - Thanks, Glenna. I think, after stumbling and thrashing around, I've got things working more to our satisfaction. Even though shapes that potentially contain text may be empty, it's possible to change the language for the associaited textframe.textrange by putting (with vba) some text in the frame, changing the language, and then deleting the text. The net result seems to be that the language associated with the placholder gets changed to the new language, even though there's no text involved. Weird. |
#4
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How to find a non-English shape that contains no text
Interesting, and thanks for confirming that what I was about to suggest works.
g A LOT of text formatting doesn't "take" if there's no text in the shape. PPT happily allows you to do anything you like with it, and equally happily ignores you. Indents, tabs and suchlike are the same. ----------------------------------------- Steve Rindsberg, PPT MVP PPT FAQ: www.pptfaq.com PPTools: www.pptools.com ================================================ |
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