@jfblagden: the default language for spellchecking documents is the language you choose in the Options - Language Settings and also dependent on any langpacks you have installed.

If you don't have the relevant langpack installed, how do you expect to have the correct dictionary by which to compare the spelling ? The Writing Aids entry under the Language Settings allows a user to add further dictionaries, if necessary by downloading from the extensions website, and have those dictionaries included by the spellchecker, so either I am failing to understand what kind of enhancement you are requesting or else this is simply invalid and will be marked as such.

Please explain what exactly you envisage as a functional enhancement request. Perhaps you are suggesting that we provide a LibreOffice app download with a complete set of dictionaries ? A decision was made against this at the beginning of the project's creation due to storage/build constraints.

Is the problem specific to Mac OSX, it doesn't appear to be so to me when I compare it to Linux versions of LibreOffice, the same thinking is present - individual langpacks that the user then configures as he/she desires.

Of course, the LibreOffice project does provide multiple dictionary installations as standard on Windows (Custom Installation)...

Bug 75734 is somewhat related to this bug. The original poster recognized the difficulty of finding an elegant and appropriate solution to the problem of missing dictionaries, and hence incorrectly flagged or otherwise ignored misspelled words in another language.

See also bug 97991 for a discussion on _reducing_ the size of the MSI Windows download to an individual language with the app, enabling separate downloads for other languages as is currently the case for Linux and Windows.

As you can see from the discussion in bug 97991, there is currently no general consensus.

In light of this question in comment 1 :

Please explain what exactly you envisage as a functional enhancement request. Perhaps you are suggesting that we provide a LibreOffice app download with a complete set of dictionaries ? 

Setting to NEEDINFO pending response from original poster.

I’m not entirely certain of the cause of the issue. If that is indeed the problem, here’s my response: 

Yes, a complete set of dictionaries would be very useful. With the sandboxing requirement on Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion) and later for apps distributed through Apple’s Mac App Store, it’s very possible that Mac OS X doesn’t share dictionaries with apps, especially third-party apps. 



But I really think it’s that LibreOffice doesn’t communicate with Mac OS X to find out the user’s language. Or if it does check, it doesn’t apply that information.

I haven’t actually read the source code yet, so I’m not 100% sure of the cause. I might review some of the code later today.

I know that Impress uses some Java code, and I don’t remember having this problem with Calc or Writer. It’s possible that the JVM is preventing interaction with the operating system. I know that Java was designed to have as little direct interaction with the operating system as possible, because it was intended to be used on the web.

So, I think I might have understood what you mean.

If I open a new Impress document (File - New) then choose any of the suggested templates, the pre-inserted strings which are localized for my language (French) are underscored as errors. If I check the character properties of these strings, LibreOffice has them set as German by default.

Any text that you enter to replace these strings keeps the same default language property.

So, confirming that this is a bug, but I believe it has already been reported, just need to find it.

Possibly a DUPLICATE or related bug to bug 107045

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 107027 ***