Colon causes spellcheck failure in some documents

[CanneH]

Hi There,

I can't consistently reproduce this, but I have attached a document that shows the error.  I am running Affinity Publisher version 1.10.1.1142 on Windows 10. 

When I have a colon at the end of a heading, it is frequently causing the spell checker to flag the word just before the colon as a spelling error.  It started in one document.  When I copy a text from that document to a new document, the spell check failure comes with it.  I have attached a document that shows the error.  

I can right click the word to fix the error and it removes the colon.  If I then add the colon, it passes the spell check.  I will try to further refine the repro steps, but hopefully the attached document will be helpful. 

 

ColonError.afpub

[DWright]

Hi @CanneH,

Welcome to the forum

When you add a character such as a colon to the end of a word it will trigger a spelling error as this word does not exist in the dictionary but if you right click the error and select the Learn Spelling it will then add the word with the colon to the dictionary and will not flag it as an error the next time the same spelling is used.

[CanneH]

It did not work this way in earlier versions and other document editing software does not do this. It’s punctuation. It should be ignored. You do not need to teach the spell check to ignore periods. Why do you need to teach it to ignore colons?

[Old Bruce]

There are languages where rules differ regarding the use of punctuation, perhaps there is a language setting somewhere in your preferences (OS and Affinity) and/or in a Paragraph or Character Style which is causing this bizarre behaviour.

I would check and see if there are any imported Text styles.

Seeing as it is intermittently happening the most obvious solution is to double and triple check the words (with a spelling underline when you use a colon). Have you actually spelt that word properly? I went for months spelling was whase. I honestly could not see it.

[Dave Vector]

Hmm, I have this same problem: words ending in a colon in a header style, flag as misspelled, when they are, in fact, correctly spelled.

I grabbed this text from the web, so I suspect it might have something to do with it, when I pasted it into Affinity Publisher.

I noticed, in the Preflight panel, that there is a down arrow glyph next to the colon.  Turning on Text > Show Special Characters (Alt+P) does not seem to reveal a difference between this arrow (new line glyph) and the normal "new paragraph" glyph.  Replacing it by deleting the paragraph symbol and typing a new one, does not fix it either.

What did work for me was adding another colon, then add a space, and then delete the second colon.

e.g.: right after the "g" in "lighting", add a second colon, (Lighting::) and then space (Lighting: :), then delete the right-most colon.

The end result is your headings will have an extra space after the colon and before the paragraph symbol, but since they are invisible, this should not be a critical document housekeeping issue.

I hope that helps,

Dave

[walt.farrell]

15 hours ago, Dave Vector said:

What did work for me was adding another colon, then add a space, and then delete the second colon.

e.g.: right after the "g" in "lighting", add a second colon, (Lighting::) and then space (Lighting: :), then delete the right-most colon.

If I'm interpreting that correctly, you replaced the colon you had copied/pasted with a new colon, and a space.

That might indicate there was something odd about the initial colon character. If you can still recreate this, it might be interesting to select both of the colon characters in the text, and then use Text > Toggle Unicode (Alt+U on Windows) to see if both characters are the same.

[Dave Vector]

Hi @walt.farrell

Thank you for the handy Alt + U trick.  I checked all the colons and they were all U+003A, but I managed to dig a little deeper and believe I have this bug 100% reproduceable.  

I put the explanation on the "Publisher 2 Bug found on Windows" Subforum.

Thanks again for your help!

 

 

[MikeTO]

Let's move all further replies to the v2 bug forum post by Dave.