Jump to content
You must now use your email address to sign in [click for more info] ×

Affinity Publisher: spell checker bad country


Recommended Posts

Hello,

Whether on the public version 1.8.3.641 or on the beta version 1.8.4.687, the prefight indicates that it can't find the fr-CH dictionary.

The initial text was indeed written on the Swiss version of Word. How to tell it the text is rather in French and therefore that the dictionary should be fr-FR?

spell.png

6 cœurs, 12 processus - Windows 11 pro - 4K - DirectX 12 - Suite universelle Affinity (Affinity  Publisher, Affinity Designer, Affinity Photo).

Mais je vous le demande, peut-on imaginer une police sans sérifs ?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

3 hours ago, Pyanepsion said:

How to tell it the text is rather in French and therefore that the dictionary should be fr-FR?

When you place the text cursor in the text, and look in the Character Panel at the Language (Spelling) option, what language does it show. If you want it to be French, that's what it should say there. If it doesn't say French, perhaps you can simply select all of the text, and change that language specification.

You could probably do that via a Character Text Style with everything set to "No Change" except for the spelling language, and setting the spelling language to French. Then Find and Replace would let you assign that to all the text.

Or, alternatively, as @IanSG mentioned, you can install an appropriate language dictionary. Easiest way is probably to make a copy of the Hunspell French dictionaries, and rename them from fr_FR (or fr-FR) to fr_CH (or fr-CH) as appropriate. Then install them as instructed in this FAQ article:

 

-- Walt
Designer, Photo, and Publisher V1 and V2 at latest retail and beta releases
PC:
    Desktop:  Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 64GB memory, AMD Ryzen 9 5900 12-Core @ 3.00 GHz, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 

    Laptop:  Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 32GB memory, Intel Core i7-10750H @ 2.60GHz, Intel UHD Graphics Comet Lake GT2 and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Laptop GPU.
iPad:  iPad Pro M1, 12.9": iPadOS 17.4.1, Apple Pencil 2, Magic Keyboard 
Mac:  2023 M2 MacBook Air 15", 16GB memory, macOS Sonoma 14.4.1

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Thank you both.

6 cœurs, 12 processus - Windows 11 pro - 4K - DirectX 12 - Suite universelle Affinity (Affinity  Publisher, Affinity Designer, Affinity Photo).

Mais je vous le demande, peut-on imaginer une police sans sérifs ?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

2 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

Easiest way is probably to make a copy of the Hunspell French dictionaries, and rename them from fr_FR (or fr-FR) to fr_CH (or fr-CH) as appropriate. 

I was thinking about that.  How does APub know what Hunspell dictionaries have been installed?  Is there an identifier in one of the files or is just down to the naming convention?

AP, AD & APub user, running Win10

Link to comment
Share on other sites

But fr_FR (or fr-FR) to fr_CH (or fr-CH) or fr_CA (or fr-CA) are differents, with different words. An French fr-Fr dictionnary won't have the same modern vocabulary since we don't add the same words each year, and all the new and technical terms are really different too.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

(Dictionary dedicated to the French language)

Dictionnaire consacré à la langue française : https://grammalecte.net/

 

6 cœurs, 12 processus - Windows 11 pro - 4K - DirectX 12 - Suite universelle Affinity (Affinity  Publisher, Affinity Designer, Affinity Photo).

Mais je vous le demande, peut-on imaginer une police sans sérifs ?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, Wosven said:

But fr_FR (or fr-FR) to fr_CH (or fr-CH) or fr_CA (or fr-CA) are differents, with different words. An French fr-Fr dictionnary won't have the same modern vocabulary since we don't add the same words each year, and all the new and technical terms are really different too.

But is it better (or worse) than having no spell check at all? It may be easier for the user to get a good Spell Check starting the the wrong French dictionary than with no dictionary at all.

-- Walt
Designer, Photo, and Publisher V1 and V2 at latest retail and beta releases
PC:
    Desktop:  Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 64GB memory, AMD Ryzen 9 5900 12-Core @ 3.00 GHz, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 

    Laptop:  Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 32GB memory, Intel Core i7-10750H @ 2.60GHz, Intel UHD Graphics Comet Lake GT2 and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Laptop GPU.
iPad:  iPad Pro M1, 12.9": iPadOS 17.4.1, Apple Pencil 2, Magic Keyboard 
Mac:  2023 M2 MacBook Air 15", 16GB memory, macOS Sonoma 14.4.1

Link to comment
Share on other sites

10 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

But is it better (or worse) than having no spell check at all? It may be easier for the user to get a good Spell Check starting the the wrong French dictionary than with no dictionary at all.

This is obviously worse, because it may wrongly give the illusion that a new text is correct or wrong when it is not.

French-speaking languages may have a strong similarity on some, but they also have a very strong difference between them, both in terms of vocabulary and typography.

Failing to find the right dictionary in the right language, the right procedure is to be alerted rather than correcting or ignoring by mistake. The best strategy, by far, is to manually change the format of text of the Swiss, or Belgian, or Canadian, or Caribbean, or any other French-language version into a French of France version of text. Fiddling a fake Swiss, or Belgian, or Canadian or Caribbean dictionary, or any other French-language version would make people believe wrongly that the non-French text of France is good or bad.

You can then use another DTP tool instead (Quark, Indesign, etc.). which uses real correction tools rather than an ersatz of like Grammalecte because the makers of Affinity have a misconception of spell checking due to their English-speaking culture and do not trust the real professionals of French correction tools ( what sufficiency!).

6 cœurs, 12 processus - Windows 11 pro - 4K - DirectX 12 - Suite universelle Affinity (Affinity  Publisher, Affinity Designer, Affinity Photo).

Mais je vous le demande, peut-on imaginer une police sans sérifs ?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

21 minutes ago, Pyanepsion said:

the makers of Affinity have a misconception of spell checking due to their English-speaking culture

If Serif really had such misconceptions about spell checking, they wouldn’t have provided separate ‘en-GB’ and ‘en-US’ dictionaries. I suspect it’s a question of market share, which would explain the decision to include only ‘pt-BR’ and not ‘pt-PT’ for Portuguese. If they had included Canadian French, some users might have wondered why they didn’t also include Canadian English; if they had included European Portuguese, some users might have expected them to include Portuguese variants for Mozambique and Angola, too.

Alfred spacer.png
Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher 2 for Windows • Windows 10 Home/Pro
Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher 2 for iPad • iPadOS 17.4.1 (iPad 7th gen)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Alfred, You're making a mix-up!

Affinity's misconception is not about the absence or existence of dictionaries for different languages. No one has ever said that. It deals with the very concept of what a correctional aid tool is for a Francophone and not trusting the real Francophone correctional professionals.

6 cœurs, 12 processus - Windows 11 pro - 4K - DirectX 12 - Suite universelle Affinity (Affinity  Publisher, Affinity Designer, Affinity Photo).

Mais je vous le demande, peut-on imaginer une police sans sérifs ?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

25 minutes ago, Pyanepsion said:

the very concept of what a correctional aid tool is for a Francophone

You’re clearly keen to broaden the scope of the term ‘spell check’, but (regardless of whether the user is a Francophone, an Anglophone or anything else) we’re not talking about a general ‘correctional aid tool’ here because we’re not talking about grammar or punctuation.

Alfred spacer.png
Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher 2 for Windows • Windows 10 Home/Pro
Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher 2 for iPad • iPadOS 17.4.1 (iPad 7th gen)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Alfred, this morning, you are definitely mixing everything! We’re going to end up thinking that you’re feeling attacked yourself as soon as we explain incidentally, apart, the reason for a major mistake by Serif.

Since you insist: Yes! Serif’s conception of what is a spelling check tool in French is obviously and clearly a mistake, and their refusal to help the 3 French-speaking companies (two French companies and one Canadian company) to make a real adapter (maybe to be a big money story?) is a major mistake.

6 cœurs, 12 processus - Windows 11 pro - 4K - DirectX 12 - Suite universelle Affinity (Affinity  Publisher, Affinity Designer, Affinity Photo).

Mais je vous le demande, peut-on imaginer une police sans sérifs ?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

19 minutes ago, Pyanepsion said:

We’re going to end up thinking that you’re feeling attacked yourself

I’m not feeling attacked at all, just misunderstood.

20 minutes ago, Pyanepsion said:

Serif’s conception of what is a spelling check tool in French is obviously and clearly a mistake

Your concept of a spell check tool in French is clearly that it should perform more than a mere spell check. That’s why I made my remark about broadening the scope of the term (as it relates to any language, including — but not limited to — French).

Alfred spacer.png
Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher 2 for Windows • Windows 10 Home/Pro
Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher 2 for iPad • iPadOS 17.4.1 (iPad 7th gen)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, Alfred said:

If Serif really had such misconceptions about spell checking, they wouldn’t have provided separate ‘en-GB’ and ‘en-US’ dictionaries.

The problem is that some xx-XX are hard coded in the apps, but they should have added all the variant, for all dictionaries to be reconized, or simply permit to reconize different "xx-XX", and leaving blank the secondary options for the users to select them.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

7 minutes ago, Wosven said:

they should have added all the variant, for all dictionaries

Nice idea, but probably an impractically huge task!

Alfred spacer.png
Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher 2 for Windows • Windows 10 Home/Pro
Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher 2 for iPad • iPadOS 17.4.1 (iPad 7th gen)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, Alfred said:

Nice idea, but probably an impractically huge task!

Impractical? That's what they've done doing it only partially. The list should be complete since lot of language have local variants, or other countries variants.
It's either impractical for the dev' or for the users. It's better if one person spend some time once to correct this, than having a lot of users that can't use correctly the apps in their own language.

A pattern able to reconize "xx-XX" woul be good, or simply able to reconize folders and  files contained in the dictionaries folder (for example, you can have "ca-CA-valencia" variant for Catalan, that doesn't follow the pattern xx-XX).

Link to comment
Share on other sites

2 hours ago, Wosven said:

It's either impractical for the dev' or for the users.

A good point well made, as the saying goes! I just can’t imagine Serif trying to cater for English as spoken in Australia, New Zealand, or South Africa, French as spoken in various African countries, and Portuguese as spoken in East Timor, Macau, or Uruguay.

Alfred spacer.png
Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher 2 for Windows • Windows 10 Home/Pro
Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher 2 for iPad • iPadOS 17.4.1 (iPad 7th gen)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

3 hours ago, Wosven said:

A pattern able to reconize "xx-XX" woul be good, or simply able to reconize folders and  files contained in the dictionaries folder (for example, you can have "ca-CA-valencia" variant for Catalan, that doesn't follow the pattern xx-XX).

They do recognize that (though I'm not sure about ca-CA-valencia, as that's not a valid ISO language as far as I know).

All you have to do is find or create the appropriate dictionaries and install them. Serif will then recognize those language variants and let you specify them for Spelling or Auto-Hyphenation purposes.

-- Walt
Designer, Photo, and Publisher V1 and V2 at latest retail and beta releases
PC:
    Desktop:  Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 64GB memory, AMD Ryzen 9 5900 12-Core @ 3.00 GHz, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 

    Laptop:  Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 32GB memory, Intel Core i7-10750H @ 2.60GHz, Intel UHD Graphics Comet Lake GT2 and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Laptop GPU.
iPad:  iPad Pro M1, 12.9": iPadOS 17.4.1, Apple Pencil 2, Magic Keyboard 
Mac:  2023 M2 MacBook Air 15", 16GB memory, macOS Sonoma 14.4.1

Link to comment
Share on other sites

17 hours ago, Wosven said:

The list should be complete since lot of language have local variants, or other countries variants.

The complete number of languages used in the world is harder to determine than one might think, but according to Ethnologue (generally considered to be a reasonably authoritative source), there are currently over 7000 distinct 'living' languages, & of course there are also 'dead' ones that might be used in documents for various reasons.

So like @Alfred said, it would be totally impractical for any app to include more than a tiny subset of them.

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.1 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
Affinity Photo 
1.10.8; Affinity Designer 1.108; & all 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

Link to comment
Share on other sites

14 hours ago, Alfred said:

I just can’t imagine Serif trying to cater for English as spoken in Australia, New Zealand, or South Africa, French as spoken in various African countries, and Portuguese as spoken in East Timor, Macau, or Uruguay.

I cannot imagine Serif (or anybody else) trying to support even the over 350 languages used in the U.S., some of them like Louisiana Creole or Navajo that are localized primarily to just a small part of one or a few U.S. states.

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.1 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
Affinity Photo 
1.10.8; Affinity Designer 1.108; & all 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

Link to comment
Share on other sites

> The complete number of languages

It doesn't concern any complete number of languages only but also different versions of spelling rules within 1 local language, for instance differing over time or differing between interest groups (e.g. professions).

In ID (2013) were 3 different dictionaries for currently spoken German (Germany only, not Swiss or Austria) which do not at all differ by words but orthography only (spelling and hyphenation). Furthermore: within 1 local German dictionary you may vary (or must decide) between 4 qualities of hyphenation rules: All, Unaesthetic, Preferred Aesthetic, Aesthetic. – For English you may choose "medicine" or "law", not besides and additionally to another English dictionary but instead of.

1471121232_dictionariesID2013.jpg.128806df5196c48322789ff2966add9a.jpg

From that perspective spelling dictionaries can be quite weird and may rather reflect political situations than natural, human languages. It's interesting that they are required and requested at all, as if people don't really know their languages and need software to get it done 'right'. But then, why 'right' at all?

macOS 10.14.6 | MacBookPro Retina 15" | Eizo 27" | Affinity V1

Link to comment
Share on other sites

4 hours ago, R C-R said:

I cannot imagine Serif (or anybody else) trying to support even the over 350 languages used in the U.S., some of them like Louisiana Creole or Navajo that are localized primarily to just a small part of one or a few U.S. states.

Funny. I remember long ago someone saying it wasn't usefull to have monitors and apps able to use more than 8-bits colours because the eyes couldn't see all of them, blablabla.

We don't ask the apps to  come with all the dictionaries, but if they were able to use different dictionaries to covert a maximum of them, and to support plugins for grammar and typography (or orthotypography, as we call it), it would be  better.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I have the impression that the subject is far removed from the original question. It only consisted of knowing how to transform a text written in one language to put it in another language.

Regarding the number of languages spoken in the world, the consensus seems to be around 6,900.

  1. (French version) https://www.canal-u.tv/video/cnrs_ups2259/combien_de_langues_sont_parlees_dans_le_monde.13034

Regarding dictionaries using the format used by Affinity, these are those used by Firefox.

  1. Run FireFox.
  2. https://addons.mozilla.org/fr/firefox/language-tools/
  3. Save link target as.
  4. Unzip with 7Zip
  5. Place in the corresponding Affinity dictionary folder respecting the international format of the file name of the folder, example: fr-FR for the French language of France.

For the variants of the French dictionary of France (current or old spelling), use the Hungspell link of Grammalecte. Avoid using the mixed version.

  1. https://grammalecte.net/download.php?prj=fr

6 cœurs, 12 processus - Windows 11 pro - 4K - DirectX 12 - Suite universelle Affinity (Affinity  Publisher, Affinity Designer, Affinity Photo).

Mais je vous le demande, peut-on imaginer une police sans sérifs ?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, Wosven said:

We don't ask the apps to  come with all the dictionaries, but if they were able to use different dictionaries to covert a maximum of them, and to support plugins for grammar and typography (or orthotypography, as we call it), it would be  better.

I am not sure what you are asking for. To clarify, is it something in addition to or as a replacement for the Hunspell Engine support already built into APub; the spelling & grammar support already built into the OS; or something else?

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.1 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
Affinity Photo 
1.10.8; Affinity Designer 1.108; & all 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

Loading...
×
×
  • Create New...

Important Information

Terms of Use | Privacy Policy | Guidelines | We have placed cookies on your device to help make this website better. You can adjust your cookie settings, otherwise we'll assume you're okay to continue.