Affinity Publisher: Spell checker manager

[Pyanepsion]

Hello,

1. In many languages, there is a slightly old version of the spelling.

For example, in France, the old handwriting now goes back a generation. The French dictionary therefore has 5 sub-dictionaries: Common, Modern, Classical, Reform, Appendix.

• Dictionary “Classic”: Common + Modern + Classic.

• Dictionary “Reform 1990”: Common + Reform.

• Dictionary “All variants”: Common + Modern + Classic + Reform + Annex.

 

How to easily manage all these possibilities many times in the same day?

2. Typographical rules may vary from one publisher to another.

How to easily manage all these possibilities?

[walt.farrell]

You would need to:

1. Find (or create) Hunspell dictionaries for the variations that you need. Then
2. Install them. Then
3. Set the default "language" in your basic Paragraph Text Styles for a document. Then
4. Set up Character Text Styles that you can use to specify an alternate Spelling Language (thus, alternate dictionary) for those words or phrases that are not in the default language.

I have no idea whether such dictionaries already exist. They're not at the common Hunspell dictionary sites that I use, but as I'm not French I haven't made an exhaustive search for them.

[Pyanepsion]

This is only possible if you always work with the same typographical rules and vocabulary options.

Here's more exactly what I'd be looking to do.

I often switch from one typographic setting to another and from one dictionary format to another in the same day and then start over with the same files the next day. The preparatory work is always carried out in Word and always indicates the language en-EN whatever the options of the 3 types of dictionaries.

Originally, Word, LibreOffice, Quark XPress, Indesign, etc. did not allow you to change typographical, grammar, and spelling settings. There was only one factory choice, American.

Manufacturers then created adapters to first integrate dictionaries of vocabularies in non-agglutinating languages, then came the dictionaries of typographic settings and then in the complex languages the dictionaries of grammars.

That was 25 years ago.

A lot of progress has been made since then, and the technique based on Hunspell is more like the old-fashioned one. You can even modify and add on-the-fly temporary activation dictionaries for each of the 3 categories, just the time of the work, for example when working on one version or another of the Bible, or on a specialized magazine… Then save these settings for later work.

Grammalecte still relies on Hunspell technology, but it still allows to get the basics of these 3 types of settings on the fly, even though they are really far from the level of commercial extensions. This works on FireFox, Chrome, LibreOffice, OpenOffice, Thunderbird, Cli, SublimeText, Wim, Emac, Pluma, Sigil…

https://grammalecte.net/#download

I imagine that this should also be possible on Affinity?

[walt.farrell]

You can only do it in Publisher by changing the spelling language for a section of text, and by having a dictionary installed that enables that spelling language. That's my step 1 above.

If you need something else, feel free to post a Feature Request. But from the perspective of answering your question: Find or create the dictionaries for your language variant(s), install them, and then you'll be able to set the language to implement the spell checking that Publisher provides via Hunspell.