Publisher missing UK English Dictionary

[Loquos]

Hello! I find my situation ironic, as I dealt with all my US English text being underlined because it wasn't UK English for the longest time, and now that I need UK English checks, it simply won't come up in AP. I am attaching multiple screenshots here, as I'm at my wit's end as to why I cannot get UK English to show up as a spell check option.

First, I checked my system languages, realized English (UK) wasn't listed there under 'Preferred languages', added it, and restarted my computer.

However, it doesn't matter if I go into the Text Style panel, the AP preferences itself, or the character panel, no where does English (UK) show up as a language option. But it does show up under the Hyphenation panel. My mind is blown.

I don't see how it would affect anything, but I added the British keyboard layout to my system preferences, and restarted my computer once again.

I'm getting the same results. English (UK) doesn't show up as an option for spelling.

There is, however, a en-GB folder in the AP Resources folder.

What do I do to get English (UK) to show up as a spellcheck/language option? Do I dare copy the en-GB data file elsewhere, delete it from the AP folder, then drag and drop in an attempt to 'reinstall'? Will this break anything? I cannot think of anything else to do. Help!

I am on Mac OS 10.15.5 / AP 1.8.4

[MEB]

Hi Loquos,
Go to  macOS System Preferences, Keyboard, Text section (on top), in the Spelling dropdown make sure British English appear there. If not, go to the end of that list and select Set Up.... Tick British English then press the Done button. Restart Publisher and check the Languages available again.

[Loquos]

On 8/5/2020 at 10:27 AM, MEB said:

Hi Loquos,
Go to  macOS System Preferences, Text section (on top), in the Spelling dropdown make sure British English appear there. If not, go to the end of that list and select Set Up.... Tick British English then press the Done button. Restart Publisher and check the Languages available again.

Once I realized you meant the Keyboard system preferences, I found the Text section and checked the Spelling dropdown. British English was listed, but for shiggles I hit Set Up, and guess what? It wasn't checked there! I checked it, fired up Publisher, and now it's an option in the Language dropdown.

Then my problem was getting it to stop marking the spelling wrong. First I changed all the text styles to the correct language. But it was still marking words wrong even though they were ok. Then I remembered that Publisher has it's own settings for Spell Check and went in there, changed to UK English, and then everything was good!

Is there a reason you can indicate language in the Text Styles but the Publisher Spell Check option overrides wether it considers something spelled wrong or not?

But yay for finally getting the UK English dictionary to work. An obvious bug in the computer OS, and not within Affinity. Thanks!

[walt.farrell]

6 minutes ago, Loquos said:

Is there a reason you can indicate language in the Text Styles but the Publisher Spell Check option

What Publisher Spell Check option are you referring to?

The only option I'm familiar with is that in the Spelling Language that you can apply via either the Text Style or via the Character panel. And if applied via the Character panel it would be a local override to any language derived from the Text Style.

[Loquos]

On 8/11/2020 at 11:44 AM, walt.farrell said:

What Publisher Spell Check option are you referring to?

The only option I'm familiar with is that in the Spelling Language that you can apply via either the Text Style or via the Character panel. And if applied via the Character panel it would be a local override to any language derived from the Text Style.

I just discovered the difference between these two and it's beautiful...

Publisher has an Auto Correct preference in the Preferences Panel, which also has a language dropdown box.

It appears that even if you set your language in the Text Style, if the language in the Preference Panel is something else, and the Base Style as something else, it doesn't work properly. Setting to UK English in the Text Style but having the Base Style or Preference Panel indicate something else (English - which appears to be US English) results in errant zeds not being picked up as a misspelling in the UK English text.

If I set the Auto Correct preference to the main language I'm working in, then set my Base Style to that same language, then as I make new styles, I only need to indicate the language if it varies from the Base.

Since the publication I'm working on is in UK English and Brazilian Portuguese, I have the Language in the Preference Panel set to English (United Kingdom), then the Base Text Style set to UK English, and then I can set up my Text Styles for Brazil PT by indicating that language in the a Text Style that I apply to the Portuguese text. So when I pop in some non-UK English text in a text frame, until I set the correct Text Style, the Auto Correct is going to mark everything wrong. As soon as I apply the PT Text Style, it overrides the UK English. (I don't know why the UK English wasn't being overridden when I selected that even though my Auto Correct was set to English US... still some bugs to work out in the system? But this is how I got it all to work properly, and now that I see it, it seems so obvious!)

Here I'd been selecting the UK English language each time because I couldn't sort out what the issue was and it still kept relining everything, and all I needed to do was set the Auto Correct and Base Style to the correct language, and the rest cascades! Yay!

I guess this is all just a long-winded way of saying, if you see something funny happening with your Spell Check, go check the Auto Correct language preference and your Base Style language setting. Those may be your culprits. 

[Loquos]

I should add, the Preference Panel Auto Correct setting seems to be linked to the working document. If I open Publisher with no file open and check the Auto Correct settings, it's back to English (US). When I open the file with the UK English and open the Auto Correct setting again, it shows English UK.

Not sure that will help anyone, but I thought I'd point it out.

[walt.farrell]

I have always believed that the language specified in the Autocorrect Preferences is not a setting, at all, but merely provides you with a set of autocorrections to be made if the language being used happens to match. My understanding has been that the default language is set from the General preference that specifies the User Interface language.

So your findings are interesting; I shall have to do some more research

Thanks!

[thomaso]

3 hours ago, Loquos said:

I should add, the Preference Panel Auto Correct setting seems to be linked to the working document.

In which way do you experience such a connection?

I recently noticed (here) that a document appears to have a spelling language saved (without an UI) which my cause preflight issues on a different computer and setup. – So I just tried your hint, but to me a switch of this Application Preference appears not to affect a current document, nor APub's factory defaults:

Note the sudden jump in the spelling language entry at 01:22 min. There I activate the document main window with a click. It's shows that the three mac-like dots in the upper left corner switch from the preference panel to the documents panel and appear to cause this way another language being displayed ("Unknown (en-DE)"). That makes me wonder what happened to the various settings before this window activation? If I am able to set a language in the character panel with only 1 document opened I'd expect the document will be affected and the displayed language will be synchronously with the document and true, even without extra activating the document window. – Do I miss or misunderstand something here?

[Loquos]

On 8/18/2020 at 2:43 PM, thomaso said:

In which way do you experience such a connection?

I recently noticed (here) that a document appears to have a spelling language saved (without an UI) which my cause preflight issues on a different computer and setup. – So I just tried your hint, but to me a switch of this Application Preference appears not to affect a current document, nor APub's factory defaults:

Note the sudden jump in the spelling language entry at 01:22 min. There I activate the document main window with a click. It's shows that the three mac-like dots in the upper left corner switch from the preference panel to the documents panel and appear to cause this way another language being displayed ("Unknown (en-DE)"). That makes me wonder what happened to the various settings before this window activation? If I am able to set a language in the character panel with only 1 document opened I'd expect the document will be affected and the displayed language will be synchronously with the document and true, even without extra activating the document window. – Do I miss or misunderstand something here?

All I know is that nothing I did in Affinity made any difference at all until I made sure my System settings indicated UK English as a language I use. 

I just tried to create what I had noticed the first time... but now I cannot reproduce.... so I guess we can forget that 'discovery'. 🤣

I do know when it was showing as ("Unknown [insert language here]") nothing worked properly, and it was only after I went into this odd setting under Keyboard that it stopped doing that. System Preferences > Keyboard > Text > Spelling > Setup... and then make sure the languages you want to use are actually selected. When I first checked this while trouble-shooting, while my Language & Region System Preferences included UK English, it was NOT checked in the Keyboard settings, even though it showed in that dropdown box. And once I checked it, tadaaa! UK English was finally a language I could select, both in Spell Check and in the Text Style options.

Maybe you have to have them set in both Language & Region and Keyboard?  I'm not sure at this point, but it's working and I don't want to mess with it. (Why are there THREE options in my Language & Region settings I have no idea, but I recall trying to get rid of the "English" one and it just came back again, so that must be a System bug.)

Edit: I don't know how to do the cool video embed, so if you want to see the settings I tweaked, you'll have to download. Sorry!

 

[SaraA]

I'm having a similar problem but in a Windows environment (Windows 10 - 64-Bit), not Linux. I'm in South Africa and Affinity is wanting me to use the "en-ZA" dictionary but it is apparently not installed. I've gone 2 ways trying to sort this out:

1. I downloaded the dictionary from Apache, but it is a .OXT file and apparently I need OpenOffice installed to open it, which I don't want to do. I work with Microsoft 365 and I don't want to put OpenOffice on my laptop, firstly because of space and secondly because I don't want to mess up my Microsoft 365 installation and I don't know if the 2 will clash. So that appears to be the end of the road for following the instructions within Affinity Publisher that I could find.

2. Within Windows I discovered that I didn't have English (South Africa) installed, so I downloaded it and now have my Windows Display Language as "English (United States) and my Preferred languages set to "English (South Africa). I then went into Affinity Publisher and made every setting that I could find read English (United States). Restarted the program as instructed, but defaulted back to wanting the "en-ZA" dictionary which is not found. I've tried locating where Windows downloaded the English (South Africa) language pack to, so that I can try putting it in the folder that Affinity Publisher appears to looking at (C:\ProgramData\Affinity\Common\1.0\Dictionaries), but I can't seem to locate it anywhere. I did find the "en-US" folder and tried copy and pasting that to above location and making everything English (United States) but again no luck.

While I have some PC knowledge, I am by no means an expert and I am now at a loss. The only thing that makes sense to me is to somehow open the .OXT file and install the required dictionary from there, but as I've stated, I don't want to put OpenOffice on my PC and even if I were to do that to open the file, will the file remain installed once I remove OpenOffice afterwards?

Does anyone have any advice / a fix for me on this please? At the moment I can't check any spelling as it is defaulting to en-ZA and that dictionary is not installed and I can't seem to change it to something else. I haven't included any screenshots but if anyone needs any further info so that they can assist me, just let me know what you require and I'll see what I can do.

Thanks so much 😃

Regards

Sara

[Alfred]

Welcome to the Serif Affinity Forums, Sara.

1 hour ago, SaraA said:

I downloaded the dictionary from Apache, but it is a .OXT file and apparently I need OpenOffice installed to open it

No, you don’t need OpenOffice. A *.oxt file is just a zip archive.

Please see the second half of this post:

 

[SarahB]

Can anyone tell me why the default language when I create a new text style in Publisher is 'Unknown (en-PT)'?

I live in Portugal, but work in UK English. UK English is my preferred language in my macOS settings (Portuguese is a secondary language), my keyboard is set to UK English. The language in Publisher General settings is English, autocorrect language is set to UK English.

I've been trying to work out why I have more than 5000 warnings in Preflight, the vast majority of which are to do with a missing en-PT dictionary. It's only reading this thread that tells me that I can specify the language for different text styles, so I've checked various and the language is 'Unknown (en-PT). Obviously I can change that which should remove most of the warnings, but it hadn't previously occurred to me that I need to check that setting.

How do I stop Portuguese being the default setting for style spellcheck?

Edited: Even when I ignore the warnings about the missing Portuguese dictionary, most of the spelling errors flagged are based on incorrect spelling in US English (colour, honour, travelled etc.) US English isn't a preference anywhere that I know of.

[Loquos]

On 9/11/2020 at 7:18 AM, SarahB said:

Can anyone tell me why the default language when I create a new text style in Publisher is 'Unknown (en-PT)'?

I live in Portugal, but work in UK English. UK English is my preferred language in my macOS settings (Portuguese is a secondary language), my keyboard is set to UK English. The language in Publisher General settings is English, autocorrect language is set to UK English.

I've been trying to work out why I have more than 5000 warnings in Preflight, the vast majority of which are to do with a missing en-PT dictionary. It's only reading this thread that tells me that I can specify the language for different text styles, so I've checked various and the language is 'Unknown (en-PT). Obviously I can change that which should remove most of the warnings, but it hadn't previously occurred to me that I need to check that setting.

How do I stop Portuguese being the default setting for style spellcheck?

Edited: Even when I ignore the warnings about the missing Portuguese dictionary, most of the spelling errors flagged are based on incorrect spelling in US English (colour, honour, travelled etc.) US English isn't a preference anywhere that I know of.

Have you checked your keyboard settings for any other languages listed there? If PT is checked there, that might be the problem. If it's not, try checking it, looking to see if that changes anything in your file, then unchecking it and looking again.

"English" spelling appears to default to US English (odd, because Affinity is not based in the US). If you don't see the UK English options in the General Settings, that's probably the problem. I had the same issue, wanting to check UK English but it kept overlooking spellings because it was checking in US English. Once I updated my Keyboard settings to include UK English, I could then pick UK English from the General settings and it started checking the document correctly.

As far as stop PT being the default, I'm unsure... but if you change the language setting in the BASE style, that should populate any new styles you makes with the same setting.

[SarahB]

19 hours ago, Loquos said:

Have you checked your keyboard settings for any other languages listed there? If PT is checked there, that might be the problem. If it's not, try checking it, looking to see if that changes anything in your file, then unchecking it and looking again.

"English" spelling appears to default to US English (odd, because Affinity is not based in the US). If you don't see the UK English options in the General Settings, that's probably the problem. I had the same issue, wanting to check UK English but it kept overlooking spellings because it was checking in US English. Once I updated my Keyboard settings to include UK English, I could then pick UK English from the General settings and it started checking the document correctly.

As far as stop PT being the default, I'm unsure... but if you change the language setting in the BASE style, that should populate any new styles you makes with the same setting.

I do have Portuguese as a language setting for my keyboard, but it's not the default setting. I've checked every setting mentioned in this thread and made sure that UK English is the default where possible, but my Base language setting for new documents is still Portuguese 😡 I'd love to know how I can change that so I don't have to remember to do it every time I start a new document.