Affinity Publisher: spell checker bad country

[Wosven]

On 7/25/2020 at 11:08 AM, R C-R said:

support already built into the OS; or something else?

I'm not fan of OS  specific choices, since it means different results for 3 different OS, and no consistency for people using the apps on different OS. And different efficiencies.

APub, at least, should be able to use different sorts of dictionaries (I suppose Hunspell doesn't cover all languages, or some other are better for some languages), and plugins like Prolexis and its little brother Le robert correcteur, or Grammalecte, etc. — I cite only french ones I know or remember since it's my area, but they should exists for other languages too.

Usually, texts are checked and corrected before, at the Word processor stage, with the limits of those apps (that only reconize 2 kinds of spaces, for example: normal and no-breaking, when we need a lot more in layout apps), but today, for different reasons, we need to be able to do it in the layout app too. And simple spell checker is limited, it don't know anything about grammar or orthotypography, and that's a shame. Dedicaced plugins would correct a lot of amateurish publications, and it would help increase the general knowledge of people doing layout.

[R C-R]

11 minutes ago, Wosven said:

I'm not fan of OS  specific choices, since it means different results for 3 different OS, and no consistency for people using the apps on different OS. And different efficiencies.

Relying wherever possible on built-in OS level support does not necessarily mean the results will be any different. It usually is considerably more efficient than relying on plug-in architectures, & of course there can be no workflow consistency unless the plug-ins are installed on every machine & they work the same way on every platform & OS version.

More to the point, it seems unlikely that it would even be feasible to devise some sort of generalized application level programming framework that different sorts of dictionaries could be plugged into unless they all conformed to some standard, which I do not believe as yet exists.

[Pyanepsion]

Spelling, typography, and their rules of use (grammar) vary considerably from one language to another. A language such as Turkish will clump words together, another such as Japanese will differentiate the meaning of words according to the context, and according to the person speaking and the person for whom it is intended. Etc.

It is therefore becoming illusory to offer integrated support in the field of spelling, because only on a case-by-case basis, extensions made by professionals in the language in question really master their part. Incidentally, this also explains the commercial failure of Anglo-Saxon and German correction tools in countries such as France.

A specific extension, however, means that the manufacturer of the main software, for example Microsoft, or Adobe, or Quark (what theyre doing), gives the necessary programming information so that the extension can bypass the default solution, here the use of Hunspell.

Anyway! It is imperative that Affinity collaborates more on this point, so that the added value brought by such extensions does not remain the strong point of its competitors.

[Irupe]

On 7/24/2020 at 8:36 AM, Alfred said:

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.

Hi, Alfred. 

I came across your comment above while searching for something else. 

I simply wanted to let you know that we in Uruguay do not speak Portuguese. We speak Spanish. 

It is true that we can understand Portuguese quite well, as it has many similarities with Spanish. In a conversation we can easily catch what they are talking about. Same is the case of Italian.

But the official language of Uruguay is Spanish. 

 Just that...  

Best regards from Montevideo!