Choosing a language for entire document

[Celeste G]

I have my operating system in English but I write documents in English and Romanian and sometimes other languages as well, like French. 

I need to be able to choose a language for the entire document and not be obligated to choose language for each element of the document. It is time consuming and very annoying. It wreaks the spell check and gives me a lot of headaches. I cannot change the operating system language every time, besides I do not like it ! The words in english are much shorter so I prefer english for the operating system.

Please add a setting for a language in the document setting so I can establish a language for the entire document and that language will be used for spell checking.

I am referring to each document, not the entire affinity application, as I do not want to change the language of the application either.

Thank you

 

 

Edited January 22, 2021 by Celeste G

[walt.farrell]

1. Best approach: If you use Text Styles for your text, just set the Base style (which all other inherit from by default) to the language you want for the document. Establish other Text Styles (also based on Base) for other languages, and apply them individually as you need them.
   or
2. Create your first Text Frame, and use the Character panel to specify the language. It will remain set that way unless you change it. You can also use Edit > Defaults > Synchronize from Selection followed by Edit > Defaults > Save to make it easy to get back to that language if you do make a change.

 

[garrettm30]

3 hours ago, Celeste G said:

Please add a setting for a language in the document setting so I can establish a language for the entire document and that language will be used for spell checking.

 

I understand where you are coming from, but unfortunately a document-wide language setting would conflict with a character-level language setting, which is never going away since it is absolutely necessary in many cases.

Since language is a character-level attribute, it is functionally equivalent to the font value (or any number of other character-level values, such as color, weight, font size, etc.). So, for instance, try to image what a document-level font setting would be like, and how that could possibly be made to work and still allow more than one font to be used in a document. Those two needs seem to me to be incompatible.

Consider also that setting a language works the same way as setting a font. You speak of being "obligated to choose language for each element of the document,” but fonts work the same way. Are you setting the font for each element of the document? If so, then I recommend you spend some time learning about text styles. When you set up a style, you would pick a font for it, then you tag text with that style. The same is true for language: you define the language as part of the style.

What Walt suggests makes it even easier, namely, using a base style. Understand that any style can be based on another style (a parent style), to inherit its attributes except where set otherwise. So what you can do is create a parent style (call it what you want) that has characteristics that all text in the document have in common, language for example, and then base other styles on the parent style, such as paragraph, heading, and whatever. Set the language once in parent style and you’re done, because every text in the whole document that is tagged with a style based on your parent style will have the language you want.

Styles are very powerful, and I would suggest that understanding how to use them is a key element to approaching layout like a professional. (Just an opinion: I don’t mean to start a war with a statement like that, as one could probably find a true professional who prefers to rarely use styles. If it works for them, then I won’t argue it. Me: I try to use local overrides as little as possible.)