Where are the dictionaries?

[Robin Rowland]

I have been following the threads on the preflight dictionaries.

Preflight is asking me for a Canadian English dictionary. Not sure how but perhaps Affinity knows from my online location or the registration.

So I have been trying to find a compatible Canadian English dictionary.,

So the previous advice on the Forum  is that there has to be a .dic file.

So you recommend using Open Office, Libre Office or Hunspell

The Open Office dictionary has the suffix .ext  (and compiles US, UK, Canadian and other dictionaries.) I already have Open Office on my computer and copied the dictionary with that wrong extension over to Affinity as recommended. It wasn't recognized.

The Libre Office dictionary has an .oxt suffix. 

the Hunspell dictionary has an .sox suffix.

So where do I get a compatible Canadian English dictionary?

 

thanks

 

Robin

[Joachim_L]

https://github.com/LibreOffice/dictionaries/tree/master/en

There are two en_CA files.

[Robin Rowland]

Still not working. I downloaded the .dic file from github.

It doesn't appear in the character drop down menu

When I then tried to point Affinity to the Program Data....Dictionaries   folder where en_CA.dic file is  you get the message "No Items march your search."

The dic file looks right at 9.39 mb

The aff file is a file that is just 103 KB .

 

RR

[walt.farrell]

You would not have the en_CA.dic file in the dictionaries directory.

You would have an en_CA directory (or possibly en-CA). Within that directory you would have the en_CA.dic file.

For more info, please see this FAQ entry:

 

[Robin Rowland]

Thanks.  The dictionary is in the right folder.

Unfortunately, there is a major problem....likely this is not the fault of Affinity.    The Canadian dictionary says every word in the file is misspelled.  So I switched to the UK dictionary and that is working as normal....only misspelled words and names etc are flagged

 

RR

[walt.farrell]

You're welcome, Robin.

Structurally both the .dic and the .aff file for en_CA look good. And as a test I installed them, and both work fine in Publisher for me.

[Len T]

Come on you guys - there has to be a better solution than what is discussed here. I'm not an inexperienced technical guy - spent 40 years of my life in IT and these are simply unusable responses to what should be a fairly straightforward process. Like where does the system get the cdn location from? Make this product more user friendly or it's going out the door...

Edited January 5, 2021 by Len T
correction in spelling...

[Bill Rosmus]

Affinity needs to get a Canadian English dictionary.  Yeah we're not as big as the USA or UK, but you should be able to do a few things with a potential market of 40 million people. If Microsoft can do it, so can you.

[walt.farrell]

20 minutes ago, Bill Rosmus said:

Affinity needs to get a Canadian English dictionary.  Yeah we're not as big as the USA or UK, but you should be able to do a few things with a potential market of 40 million people. If Microsoft can do it, so can you.

They are available for you to install from the LibreOffice GitHub site given in the FAQ, though you will need to download the US or UK English hyphenation dictionary and rename it if you want automatic hyphenation to work in Publisher.

[Ron P.]

9 hours ago, Bill Rosmus said:

If Microsoft can do it, so can you.

Wow, what a compliment to Serif, to be ranked with the largest corporation. 😲 MS has net assets of over $304 Billion, with roughly 160,000 employees. I'm guessing Serif would be very happy with just 1/4 of that revenue. 😉

[Kossilar]

On 3/2/2020 at 3:01 PM, Robin Rowland said:

Thanks.  The dictionary is in the right folder.

Unfortunately, there is a major problem....likely this is not the fault of Affinity.    The Canadian dictionary says every word in the file is misspelled.  So I switched to the UK dictionary and that is working as normal....only misspelled words and names etc are flagged

 

RR

I'm having the same issue. 

[walt.farrell]

14 minutes ago, Kossilar said:

I'm having the same issue. 

Welcome to the Serif Affinity forums.

Is your problem also with Canadian English?

What OS do you use?

[Penguins]

I'm stuck. I've followed as many posts as I can and have done all the instructions but the spellcheck either doesn't work or it underlines everything red.

I'm pretty sure my file is in the right place and I downloaded as instructed.

I tried setting the Language to English (US) and also to English (UK) and neither work. 

I'd be happy just getting something to work so my basic spelling is covered. At this point, Canadian spelling is just a bonus.

I did find these locations (Thanks to Kieran)

1. Preferences > General > Language
2. Preferences > Auto-Correct
3. Text Styles tab > Edit style(s) > Character > Language
4. with document text selected > Character tab > Language > Spelling

I set them to US to test but I'm still getting the unknown language error when I run the spellchecker and the CA dictionary is removed.

I have less, but still many normal words underlined as incorrect when the Canadian dictionary is there and the spellcheck highlights blanks as being spelled wrong.

If I remove the hyphen file, I get the unknown language error again.

It's a royal pain to have to go through all my character styles and set them to English (US). It would be nicer if they didn't default to a language that didn't exist.

Please help.

Thanks. 

Edited April 19, 2022 by Penguins
an incorrect screen shot ended up at the bottom so I deleted it.

[Frances Proctor]

how do I download the file when I go to copy the file all I get is copy link but if I click on the file it just opens the file no download ?  I just want to easily download the file.  Is there a download link somewhere?

[walt.farrell]

9 hours ago, Frances Proctor said:

how do I download the file when I go to copy the file all I get is copy link but if I click on the file it just opens the file no download ?  I just want to easily download the file.  Is there a download link somewhere?

Instructions for how to download are in the first post in this FAQ (be sure to follow them exactly), and direct download links (which are easier to use) are in the second post: