Affinity Publisher: strange French spell checker

[Pyanepsion]

Hello,

I had to check 6 pages containing proper names. I had to memorize each word one by one in the dictionary and it took me many hours where it should have taken only a few minutes!

The French spell checker integrated into Publisher is almost unsuitable for professionnal use.

1. It is based on the principles of English spelling, a language which hardly knows declensions, genres, conjugations, and homophones: les pools des poules du couvent couvent un oeuf neuf.
2. This also requires an in-depth analysis of the limit and then of the structure of each sentence, which the French spellchecker integrated into Publisher has no idea.
3. Therefore, it is based on a comparison with a list of words, as in the 1980s! Which is stupid (really!) for use in the French language.
4. It cannot recognize a word in upper and lower case: Manger des pommes et manger des poires.
5. It does not know French typographic spaces.
6. This tool is also based on the spelling of old French, which has not been used for more than a generation.

Creating spelling software is a profession. I do not understand why we find here the lists of Olivier R. for Mozilla in 2012!

Impossible for it to correct this funny example where there are only spelling mistakes (no grammar error) about Little Red Riding Hood:

Aile pot cédé thym lit vrai dû peu t’y chat peu rond roux jeu.

who should be:

Elle possédait un livret du petit chaperon rouge.

The French company Diagonal from Nice, would no doubt be very happy to be able to implement a French adapter, as it has done for other applications such as Microsoft Office, Quark XPress, InDesign (and many other softwares). It has experience. It has existed since 1995. Many large publishers of books, newspapers, and magazines, as well as all French state departments, too, use their spelling checkers.

Why would Serif not grant them the authorization and the informations necessary to create such an adapter?

This would be of great service to the French and English speaking user community.

https://www.prolexis.com/societe/la-societe-diagonal#contact

[walt.farrell]

It sounds like you might be looking for a grammar checker, not a spelling checker. While some have asked for that, and it might be an interesting new function, it is not a function that the Affinity applications offer today.

It does sound like something you should post in the Feature Requests forum, but I don't see how lack of that function can be considered a bug.

[Pyanepsion]

In French, unlike other languages such as English (for example), spelling and grammar are intimately linked. You can't have one without the other. Moreover, in addition to offering a tool where you can spend several hours memorizing words where you should only spend a few minutes, Publisher offers a vocabulary list that is more than a generation out of date! It still had to dare.

Creating spelling software is a profession. Let the professionals do it.

 

[Alfred]

6 minutes ago, Pyanepsion said:

In French, unlike other languages such as English (for example), spelling and grammar are intimately linked. You can't have one without the other.

How are spelling and grammar any more intimately linked in French than in English? Many people using English will write “it’s” instead of “its” (e.g. “on it’s own”) or “then” instead of “than” (e.g. “stranger then that”) but such things are grammatical errors which use correctly spelled words, so I wouldn’t expect a spell checker to pick them up.

[Joachim_L]

It seems to be, that the dictionaries you get from here https://github.com/LibreOffice/dictionaries/tree/master/fr_FR are newer than the ones coming with the installation of Affinity.

[Pyanepsion]

2 hours ago, Alfred said:

How are spelling and grammar any more intimately linked in French than in English?

You are right! Grammar is obviously also important even in languages like English, and an English adaptor would obviously be welcome too.

The structure of French and English are, however, very different. A simple word existence checker is often enough in English, but it is almost completely useless in French as shown in the example above with Little Red Riding Hood.

[Alfred]

3 hours ago, Pyanepsion said:

A simple word existence checker is often enough in English

Often, perhaps, but by no means always!

Please see https://annex.exploratorium.edu/exhibits/ladle/

[Pyanepsion]

3 hours ago, Alfred said:

please see

Hey! The purpose of this bug report is obviously not to compare this or that language!

It is a question of highlighting that the dictionary provided by Serif is of another age, not to say useless, and of recalling that there exist very competent specialized companies capable of carrying out a really useful extension of correction of text .

What a horror to have to spend 4 h 30 instead of a few minutes on barely 6 pages, just to enter proper names so as to purge the spelling checker and detect the real errors, not those that this spelling checker invented by incompetence.

It is sufficient that Serif authorizes these companies and that it provides them with information on the necessary adapters.

[Wosven]

But having Prolexis (Diagonal) or Antidote is a feature, since it's a need for plugin, not a bug.

You can also use those apps before inserting the text in a layout, and those works fine with Words, browsers and other apps. That's usually how it's done, so the author or copy editor don't get distracted by the layout app he usually don't know how to use.  Unless in a rush, or depending of planning, there's time to get the text in the layout before the copy reader can read the texts…

But all kind of plugins would be helpfull.