Spell check "ignore" and "learn" in Publisher

[Ken Hjulstrom]

Hi,

I've been dealing with a couple of issues regarding spell check in Publisher.  The first is when I right-click on a word that's been flagged by the spell-checker as being misspelled and select "Ignore Spelling", everything works as I would expect, with the Preflight notice of that word being misspelled disappearing.  But more often than not (and possibly every time), when I close the document and reopen it, Publisher seems to have "forgotten" all of the words that I've flagged as "Ignore Spelling", so I have to flag them all over again.  Is this the intended behavior of the "Ignore Spelling" status of words?

My second question is related to the "Learn Spelling" option.  The documents that I'm working with are primarily written in U.K. English, and I, living in the U.S., have Publisher's main language for menu text, etc. set to U.S. English, and I'm using the U.K. English version of the spell check dictionary, and this setup is working well.  However, some of the text that appears in the documents is of a historical nature, and often references names and addresses in other languages that Preflight rightly flags as misspelled words, and are words that might never appear in future documents that I work on.  I've been flagging these as "Ignore Spelling" as well, but I'm wondering if I should be using "Learn Spelling" instead.  I'm a bit reluctant to use "Learn Spelling", as I haven't yet found any way to inspect the set of words for which I've specified "Learn Spelling" (only two words, so far).  For one of these words, I've tried using the "Unlearn Spelling" option, but it doesn't seem to work, since subsequent right-clicks on that word still offer the "Unlearn Spelling" option instead of the "Learn Spelling" option, which I would have expected to see if the "Unlearn Spelling" command had actually worked.

Suggestions on how to improve my handling of words not in the spell check dictionary that I'm using would be much appreciated.

Thanks,

Ken

 

[Dan C]

Hi @Ken Hjulstrom,

My sincerest apologies for the delayed response here!

On 2/5/2021 at 12:18 AM, Ken Hjulstrom said:

when I close the document and reopen it, Publisher seems to have "forgotten" all of the words that I've flagged as "Ignore Spelling", so I have to flag them all over again.  Is this the intended behavior of the "Ignore Spelling" status of words?

I can confirm that this does not sound correct. As I understand it, 'Ignore Spelling' is set on a document basis, meaning you can choose to ignore certain spelling for a document and that should be recalled after saving and reopening the same document.
To test this, I created a Publisher document with the word 'bluberries' (intentionally misspelt), then right-clicked the word and selected 'Ignore spelling'. Underneath this, I added the word 'hhouse' but this time did not select 'Ignore Spelling'.

I then saved the document, closed Publisher completely and relaunched the app. When re-opening this document, the word 'bluberries' was not underlined as Publisher had recalled the 'ignore spelling' option. 'hhouse' was still underlined in red, as I had not ignored this error.

Is this happening for you in multiple documents, or only in one document please?

On 2/5/2021 at 12:18 AM, Ken Hjulstrom said:

However, some of the text that appears in the documents is of a historical nature, and often references names and addresses in other languages that Preflight rightly flags as misspelled words, and are words that might never appear in future documents that I work on.  I've been flagging these as "Ignore Spelling" as well, but I'm wondering if I should be using "Learn Spelling" instead.

I would say that 'Ignore Spelling' is the correct option here if these words are unlikely to appear in future documents then you don't need to add them to your custom dictionary as mentioned so removing the spell-check of these words, for this document only sounds like the best choice. Of course this would require 'Ignore Spelling' to be working correctly for you.

On 2/5/2021 at 12:18 AM, Ken Hjulstrom said:

I'm a bit reluctant to use "Learn Spelling", as I haven't yet found any way to inspect the set of words for which I've specified "Learn Spelling" (only two words, so far).

Unfortunately there's no option to see all of your manually 'learnt' spellings currently, although we do hope to add this in the future.

On 2/5/2021 at 12:18 AM, Ken Hjulstrom said:

For one of these words, I've tried using the "Unlearn Spelling" option, but it doesn't seem to work, since subsequent right-clicks on that word still offer the "Unlearn Spelling" option instead of the "Learn Spelling" option, which I would have expected to see if the "Unlearn Spelling" command had actually worked.

Unfortunately I'm not seeing this behaviour either - does this happen in only one document, or only with one specific word for you? Many thanks in advance 

[Ken Hjulstrom]

Hi Dan,

Thanks for your response.  Based on your findings, I did some additional investigation, and found the following:

I primarily use Publisher to lay out a 40-page quarterly magazine.  The most current version contains approximately 75 images as well as the article text.  I can repeatedly open this document, and Preflight reports 101 "spelling mistakes", which take me about 20 minutes to clean up.  Many of these instances are duplicates; the same word being reported as misspelled each time it appears in the document.  The magazine is for an organization based in the U.K., and I live in the U.S.A, so I'm running Publisher on my Mac with the standard U.S. English menu text, etc., but I'm using the U.K. English dictionary for spell checking.  Since many of the articles in the publication are of an international or historic nature, most of the words flagged by the spell checker are non-English words, or are the foreign names of people who are mentioned in the articles. These words and names aren't recurring from issue to issue, which it why I flag them with "Ignore Spelling" rather than "Learn Spelling", which I may do for the names of regularly-contributing authors.

I tried creating a small-scale document to try to replicate this problem, but I was unsuccessful; the Preflight messages were consistent with the previous "Ignore Spelling" directives that I had used in previous editing sessions.  One thing that I was able to reproduce is some sort of bug (or maybe "unexpected behavior") that seems to be related to punctuation that's appended to words not found in the standard dictionary that's in use.  Here are the steps to reproduce this issue:

 

1. Open a new project, selecting "Letter" (8.5" x 11") from the "Print" category of document sizes (this probably doesn't matter, though)
2. Add a text frame to the single page, and expand it out to the standard margins (the size probably doesn't matter, though)
3. In the text frame, add the following text:
   
   This is a test.  Here is a missspelled word.  A foreign word is l’honneur without quotes or surrounding punctuation.  Here is a foreign word with attached punctuation l’honneur.  Here is an additional sentence.
    
4. With the English (not "English (United Kingdom)" dictionary specified in the "Character" studio settings, there should be three words underlines as being misspelled:  "missspelled", which really is misspelled, and two instances of "l'honneur", a French word.
5. Open Preflight, and all three words are correctly flagged as being "misspelled" ("l'honneur" is spelled correctly, but isn't in the English dictionary).
6. Double-click on the Preflight message about "missspelled", which highlights the word.  Right-click on the word, and select "Ignore Spelling" from the menu.  The word is no longer underlined, and the Preflight message about this word disappears.  This is all correct.
7. Do the same thing for the first message about the word "l'honneur".  The word is no longer underlined, and the Preflight message about this word disappears.  This is also correct.
8. Try the same thing for the remaining message about the word "l'honneur".  After selecting "Ignore Spelling" from the popup menu, the word is still highlighted, and the Preflight message remains.
9. This issue seems to be related to the fact that there is a period directly following "l'honneur", which seems to be interfering with the consistent matching of this instance of the word to the one surrounded by whitespace.  I figured out that I can resolve this by the following operations:
10. Step 1)  Insert a space between the word and the period.  The word is apparently then identified as a match for the previous instance of "l'honneur", and the underlining disappears, as well as the Preflight message.
11. Step 2)  Delete the space that was inserted in the previous step.  This restores the text to its correct state, and the Preflight message doesn't return.

I've noticed this type of problem not only for words with appended punctuation, but also with words that only differ by capitalization not related to initial sentence capitalization.

Thanks,

Ken

 

 

[Dan C]

Many thanks for the in-depth steps provided here @Ken Hjulstrom and my apologies once again for the delayed response here.

I can confirm I'm able to replicate this issue, specifically;

On 2/14/2021 at 1:17 AM, Ken Hjulstrom said:

I've noticed this type of problem not only for words with appended punctuation, but also with words that only differ by capitalization not related to initial sentence capitalization.

I believe this is likely what was causing the originally reported issue and there certainly does seem to be an issue here that needs resolving.

I will get this logged with our developers now to be fixed in a future version - many thanks for your report

[stucor]

Hi @Dan C- I am just evaluating Affinity Publisher (V2) and I was wondering if there had been any movement on being able to see (and edit) the list of words that have been learnt by the spell checker? Many thanks.

[Dan C]

Welcome to the Affinity Forums @stucor 

Unfortunately there's no list of these words currently within Publisher, my apologies.

You can however right-click on a 'learnt' spelling, and select 'unlearn' to remove a previously added entry.

I'll be sure to 'bump' the improvement request with our developers for this option now - I hope this clears things up!

[MikeTO]

@Ken Hjulstrom If you're on a Mac, you can view the list of words added to the dictionary by using Finder to go to Macintosh HD > Users > username > Library > Spelling. The dictionary is a plain text file named en_UK, en_CA or something like that - look for the most recently updated file. Learning words in Affinity on Mac adds the words to this system-wide dictionary, not a custom Affinity dictionary.

This file can be edited but it's not a good idea unless you are confident in what you're doing. If you do edit it ensure your changes are alpha sorted and do so only while other apps aren't running and restart your Mac after saving changes to the file. And back it up before you mess with it.

Note that Apple's apps will save added words to a generic dictionary (named LocalDictionary) if you choose Spelling > Automatic by Language from System Settings (previously known as System Preferences). I have changed my own setting to the version of English I want to use so that Affinity and Apple's apps are all using the same dictionary.

[R C-R]

2 hours ago, MikeTO said:

Note that Apple's apps will save added words to a generic dictionary (named LocalDictionary) if you choose Spelling > Automatic by Language from System Settings (previously known as System Preferences).

FWIW, in Catalina there seems to be no Spelling > Automatic by Language option, nor any of the others you show besides the first two in System Preferences > Keyboard > Input Sources. I have a vague memory of some of those lower down items being somewhere else (besides in System Preferences?) but I can't remember where they are.

However, there is a LocalDictionary file with a few items in it on my Mac, & I think that has been there since around 2013, so it does get used by Apple(?) apps.

[MikeTO]

35 minutes ago, R C-R said:

FWIW, in Catalina there seems to be no Spelling > Automatic by Language option, nor any of the others you show besides the first two in System Preferences > Keyboard > Input Sources. I have a vague memory of some of those lower down items being somewhere else (besides in System Preferences?) but I can't remember where they are.

However, there is a LocalDictionary file with a few items in it on my Mac, & I think that has been there since around 2013, so it does get used by Apple(?) apps.

Settings/Preferences was heavily redesigned in Ventura. In Big Sur and Catalina you'll find spelling language under Keyboard > Text and there should still be an Automatic by Language option.

LocalDictionary will be created, if it doesn't exist, when you have Automatic by Language selected and learn words in apps like Notes and Mail. If you switch the spelling language to a specific language then it will create the specific exceptions dictionary when you next learn a word.

[R C-R]

1 minute ago, MikeTO said:

In Big Sur and Catalina you'll find spelling language under Keyboard > Text and there should still be an Automatic by Language option.

Thanks! I guess I should have noticed that because not infrequently I open Keyboard > Text to add or edit the replace text list. Currently I have about 40 items on that list!

[Ken Hjulstrom]

8 hours ago, stucor said:

Hi @Dan C- I am just evaluating Affinity Publisher (V2) and I was wondering if there had been any movement on being able to see (and edit) the list of words that have been learnt by the spell checker? Many thanks.

Hi stucor,

I can't yet comment on being able to see (and edit) the list of words that have been learned by the spell checker in Publisher V2, but I just finished laying out a 60-page magazine containing articles with many foreign names and words (which I told Publisher to "ignore"), and I had no problems at all with Publisher "forgetting" what I had previously told it to "ignore".  I don't use the "learn" option, since most of the names and foreign words that the spell checker flags change between magazine issues, so it's not really worth it for me to tell Publisher to "learn" these; I just tell it to "ignore" them.  It also seems that the spell checker is now better able to determine that words with differing capitalization are in fact the same word (when I first made this original post, if I told Publisher to "ignore" a word that was all lowercase, and it later appeared as the first word in a sentence, with an initial capital, I'd have to tell Publisher to "ignore" the version with an initial capital as well).

Hope this helps,

Ken

[Ken Hjulstrom]

3 hours ago, MikeTO said:

@Ken Hjulstrom If you're on a Mac, you can view the list of words added to the dictionary by using Finder to go to Macintosh HD > Users > username > Library > Spelling. The dictionary is a plain text file named en_UK, en_CA or something like that - look for the most recently updated file. Learning words in Affinity on Mac adds the words to this system-wide dictionary, not a custom Affinity dictionary.

This file can be edited but it's not a good idea unless you are confident in what you're doing. If you do edit it ensure your changes are alpha sorted and do so only while other apps aren't running and restart your Mac after saving changes to the file. And back it up before you mess with it.

Note that Apple's apps will save added words to a generic dictionary (named LocalDictionary) if you choose Spelling > Automatic by Language from System Settings (previously known as System Preferences). I have changed my own setting to the version of English I want to use so that Affinity and Apple's apps are all using the same dictionary.

 

[Ken Hjulstrom]

Hi MikeTO,

I took a look at the dictionary files that you mentioned, and I was quite surprised to see that they did in fact contain words that I must have specified "learn spelling" to during past uses of Publisher.  Since these files are hidden, I'm wondering if there's some way to edit them using the MacOS UI rather than editing them directly.  To me, it seems odd that Publisher is storing "learned" words in a system-wide list.  I'd much prefer that apps that run spell checkers give me a choice between adding words to the apps' own "learned" word list by default, and then offering the user the opportunity to specify whether or not to allow the app to then use the system's "learned" word list.

Thanks,

Ken

 

[R C-R]

7 minutes ago, Ken Hjulstrom said:

To me, it seems odd that Publisher is storing "learned" words in a system-wide list.

That is just the way 'learn spelling' works in the Mac OS, although note that it is not system-wide, it is per user, which is why you find these dictionary files in the user name Library folder instead of the root level Library folder.

Also, they are hidden only because they are in the user's Library folder, which is normally hidden but can be set to always be visible if you want.

[MikeTO]

There is no way to edit these files through the macOS UI. But there just plain text files and I've edited mine many times.

[Josh HH]

Working like this with the Spelling is really a pain - I use the Dutch language which makes it even worse because there is (still) no general Dutch language implemented. How do you think ever to win the competition with InDesign if these important issues are not solved. Every time I 'learn' a word or ignore a misspelled word, it comes back the next time I open the document. I might be doing something wrong, but I checked everywhere but this seems to be the way Affinity works with lesser popular languages. Very unstable. Of course, going to another app takes some learning and searching, but this is really making me wonder if I can go on making my book with 160+ pages in Affinity. Show me I'm wrong, please.....

[walt.farrell]

33 minutes ago, Josh HH said:

Working like this with the Spelling is really a pain - I use the Dutch language which makes it even worse because there is (still) no general Dutch language implemented.

There is a Dutch dictionary for Spelling; just no Dutch language for the User Interface. You can see this FAQ for instructions on locating and installing the additional dictionaries. Note: I would use the first post in the FAQ to see where to install the dictionary, and how. But I would use the second post to download the dictionary files, to make sure they're in the right format. Also, the FAQ is for V1 but also works for V2 of all the applications.

 

33 minutes ago, Josh HH said:

Every time I 'learn' a word or ignore a misspelled word, it comes back the next time I open the document.

Please confirm which version of the application you're using, and which application.

[Josh HH]

Hi Walt,

thank you for your quick response. I already installed the Dutch dictionary, that is not my problem. The problem is that after ignoring or learning a 'misspelled' word, it comes back again. It disappears when I push: Ignore, then the problem is gone, but as soon as I open the document again, the misspelling is there again. So I have to get through the same motion over and over again. It just doesn't learn or ignore for ever. And by the way:in my text I write about the British band BADFINGER (a brilliant band in my opinion) but not recognised by the Affinity SPELLING COMMITEE. Even when I go to Google to confirm their existence. It will not disappear. Maybe because it is a bad word? 

I know it is difficult to tackle, but for me, this just doesn't make sense. This was a thing I had when I was one of the early adopters of Affinity. I had hopes that it wopuld be workable in version 2. But this is really hard to make a book with.

[walt.farrell]

8 minutes ago, Josh HH said:

Hi Walt,

thank you for your quick response. I already installed the Dutch dictionary, that is not my problem. The problem is that after ignoring or learning a 'misspelled' word, it comes back again. It disappears when I push: Ignore, then the problem is gone, but as soon as I open the document again, the misspelling is there again. So I have to get through the same motion over and over again. It just doesn't learn or ignore for ever. And by the way:in my text I write about the British band BADFINGER (a brilliant band in my opinion) but not recognised by the Affinity SPELLING COMMITEE. Even when I go to Google to confirm their existence. It will not disappear. Maybe because it is a bad word? 

I know it is difficult to tackle, but for me, this just doesn't make sense. This was a thing I had when I was one of the early adopters of Affinity. I had hopes that it wopuld be workable in version 2. But this is really hard to make a book with.

Again: Please confirm which version (build/release) of the application, and which application(s) and on which Operating System.

[Ken Hjulstrom]

7 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

Again: Please confirm which version (build/release) of the application, and which application(s) and on which Operating System.

I'm using Affinity Publisher 2 Version 2.0.4, and the handling of BADFINGER seems to work fine for me.  Using the "Nederlands" dictionary, I created a new document consisting of the text of your post here about "BADFINGER".  Running Preflight, "BADFINGER" was flagged as a "Spelling Mistake", but when I right-clicked on that word in the document and selected "Ignore Spelling", the "misspelling" actually was ignored upon subsequent loads of the document.  Your report of Publisher "forgetting" all of the "Ignore Spelling" indications that had been specified in a previous instance of the document is exactly what I had been experiencing when I first made this post over two years ago, but I don't recall experiencing this issue in the past few months.

Ken

 

[Josh HH]

Hi Ken, thank you for your answer. And Walt, sorry I overlooked your question to inform you of my set up. I forgot to mention that I use Affinity Publisher 2, V 2.04 and use it on a Mac Pro computer (Monterey, because of some musical apps that still don't work well with the latest Mac OS).

I was hopeful after Ken's comment, so I started the document again and found that my name (Haijer) and the word Badfinger were misspelled. I corrected this by 'Learning' saved and closed the document. I opened the document and everything was alright, so I thought: well, Ken did the trick, helping me by just writing.... Then I closed the document again, left Affinity, opened Affinity again, opened the document and, alas, there were the misspellings again. Other misspellings were corrected, so that is the good news. I read about dictionaries on Mac but I don't understand exactly what I can do about this. If it is only two words that are not corrected, that is no problem, but I'm getting a bit nervy about producing a whole book with this.... Anyway, thanks for trying to help me out! Kind regards, Josh Haijer

[walt.farrell]

Thanks, @Josh HH.

I have seen something similar in another report, which also fails on Windows, but I thought it was new in the 2.1 beta. I'll link the two topics together so Serif knows.

Beta topic: https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/183332-spelling-learn-option-does-not-save-settings/

 

[MikeTO]

I tested it on macOS Ventura. I set the spelling language to Dutch. Typed badfinger. Right clicked it when it was flagged and chose Ignore. I saved the document and re-opened it. It was still ignored.

In a second document I set the spelling language to Dutch. Typed badfinger. Right clicked it when it was flagged and chose Learn. macOS created a new spelling dictionary for me since I didn't have a Dutch one, adding the word badfinger to Users/<username>/Library/Spelling/nl.

 

[MikeTO]

One other point for macOS users - if you manually edit a spelling dictionary file, or download one from the internet and copy it to the spelling directory, ensure that the file isn't locked and restart macOS after making any manual changes. If the file is locked or is anything other than a plain text file then macOS won't be able to save new words to it, and I think there may be some caching going on so making changes to the file without restarting could lead to unpredictable outcomes.

[walt.farrell]

@MikeTO: At least for the issue with Learn, it seems to be important to close and reopen the Affinity application, not just the document, to experience the problem.