How to find a non-English shape that contains no text

  • Thread starter Thread starter david.f.jenkins
  • Start date Start date
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david.f.jenkins

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!
 
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
 
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










- Show quoted text -
Click to expand...

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.
 
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.
 
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