[[Solved] Not a bug] Language not staying set in Preferences, reverting to English UK each time I start it up.

[Old Bruce]

This has been driving me up the wall. I have only one language,English (Canada), set in my Mac OS Preferences' Language and Region tab. I have Default set for the Language in Publisher's General Tab because I have assumed that it will Default to the OS's primary language and also because there is no English (Canada) in the list. However, every place to set the language in Publisher's preferences will reset to English (UK) on starting the application. I set it to English (Canada) for Abbreviations, Auto-Correct, Filler Text, and Title Exceptions.

Maybe I am doing this incorrectly and should choose the English without any localization as opposed to English (United States) or the Default which, as I stated, I am assuming means I am choosing my Mac OS's Preference of English (Canada) as Primary and only language.

 

[walt.farrell]

8 minutes ago, Old Bruce said:

I set it to English (Canada) for Abbreviations, Auto-Correct, Filler Text, and Title Exceptions.

English (Canada) is not a setting for those preferences. All of them simply specify a list of the abbreviations, auto-correct values, Filler Text, and Title Exceptions that will apply when (if) the text you're entering happens to have English (Canada) specified as its Spelling Language. If the text has some other Spelling Language specified, a different set of those preferences will apply to that text.

 

[Old Bruce]

Thanks Walt. I see how I could misunderstand that. "Ignorance. Shear ignorance" to quote Samual Johnson when he was asked how he "...could have made such a mistake?" in a word's definition.

[MikeTO]

42 minutes ago, Old Bruce said:

This has been driving me up the wall. I have only one language,English (Canada), set in my Mac OS Preferences' Language and Region tab. I have Default set for the Language in Publisher's General Tab because I have assumed that it will Default to the OS's primary language and also because there is no English (Canada) in the list. However, every place to set the language in Publisher's preferences will reset to English (UK) on starting the application. I set it to English (Canada) for Abbreviations, Auto-Correct, Filler Text, and Title Exceptions.

Maybe I am doing this incorrectly and should choose the English without any localization as opposed to English (United States) or the Default which, as I stated, I am assuming means I am choosing my Mac OS's Preference of English (Canada) as Primary and only language.

You're not doing anything incorrectly and it's definitely a design flaw. I've reported this before.

39 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

English (Canada) is not a setting for those preferences. All of them simply specify a list of the abbreviations, auto-correct values, Filler Text, and Title Exceptions that will apply when (if) the text you're entering happens to have English (Canada) specified as its Spelling Language. If the text has some other Spelling Language specified, a different set of those preferences will apply to that text.

This works much better for Americans than Canadians. Old Bruce is right, it's a flaw.

Preferences > General > Language just offers English UK and English US but not English Canada or the other variations. It's a great design choice and probably worked well in 1.0 when I assume there were just UK and US English languages supported. But then more English variations were added without adding more UK variations so the design no longer works.

Preferences > General > Language > Default will use the OS default. If you're in the UK it will default to English (which means UK) and if you're in the US it will default to English United States. This controls the UI language and the default language for new documents. Preferences > Auto Correct, Abbreviations, Title Exceptions, or Filler Text will all default to the correct language. Whether you set Language to Default or English (UK) or English United States, it will just work. You are lucky.

First, here's the Preferences > General > Language list - note that "English" means UK English, it's just not named clearly. English (United States) means exactly what it says.

Now let's look at Auto Correct or the other three Preferences panes. If Language = English, these other panes will default to English (United Kingdom) and if Language = English (United States) these panes will default to English (which means US). These lists were designed the opposite of Language with UK spelled out and US omitted. This is somewhat confusing but UK and US users probably never notice it because the system works as designed for them.

But if you're outside the US or UK and have Preferences > General > Language set to Default or your specific English variation such as English (Canada), these panes will default to English (United Kingdom) and every single time you must manually select your language or you'll be editing the wrong version and will be confused when the data you edit does nothing. This is made worse because only English UK and US have default values for things like Auto Correct - these features really don't work for English users outside the UK and US unless you spend hours manually updating the features to duplicate what is included for UK and US users.

UK vs. US vs. Canada/Australia...

Consider a brand new non-UK/US English user who opens Affinity and although they had English Canada in macOS system preferences, Affinity defaults to English (UK). They go to Preferences and won't find an English Canada option so they have to come to this online forum and be instructed to use Edit > Defaults > Save to change their default language for new documents. While that feature makes sense, they really should be able to set their default language in Preferences and Affinity really should use the system default instead of giving them UK English. And while it's not important, it really would be nice if words like Capitalise were spelled correctly in the UI.

The easiest way for Serif to fix this would be to create more UI language packages so the other English variations can be added to the Preferences > General > Language list. Affinity would simply work as designed without any other coding changes. It means more UI language packages which means more work as the menus and dialogs are modified.

The alternative way to fix this if Serif really wants to keep the number of English UI packages to two is to:

• If Preferences > General > Language = Default and no default document language has been saved by the user, set the default document language to the system language which presumably would be English Canada or whatever.
• Default the Preferences > Auto Correct and other panes to the default document language rather than the UI language

 

 

[walt.farrell]

5 hours ago, MikeTO said:

Preferences > General > Language just offers English UK and English US but not English Canada or the other variations.

That Preference determines the language used in the UI, and Serif does not provide any other English translations for the UI. It is not, except tangentially (?), related to the language you might happen to use within a document in the Affinity applications.

[MikeTO]

16 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

That Preference determines the language used in the UI, and Serif does not provide any other English translations for the UI. It is not, except tangentially (?), related to the language you might happen to use within a document in the Affinity applications.

No, it definitely controls the default language for an Affinity document. I can't say I fully understand what Affinity is doing though. For example.

1. Set Preferences > General > Language to German, it will restart.
2. Create a new document and draw a frame - Character > Language > Spelling will be German (you might have to factory reset your defaults). This works as I'd expect it to if the Language preferences is supposed to control the default language for a new document as it appears to do.
3. Set Preferences > General > Language to English (which means United States), it will restart.
4. Create a new document but don't draw a new frame yet - Character > Language > Spelling will be English (Canada) for me. I can't figure out why it is choosing Canada now. Yes, my macOS is set to English Canada but a second ago it took German from Preferences so why is it now taking English Canada from macOS? Factory resetting my defaults won't fix this.
5. Now choose the Frame Text tool - Character > Language > Spelling will still be English (Canada) for me. Change it to English (which means United States). Choose Edit > Defaults > Save.
6. Quit and restart Publisher just to prove it's not a session issue and create a new document but don't draw a new frame yet - Character > Language > Spelling will still be English (Canada) for me!
7. Now choose the Frame Text tool - Character > Language > Spelling will change to English (which means United States).
8. Choose the Move tool again - Character > Language > Spelling will be English (Canada) for me. This makes no sense.
9. Anyway, draw a text frame and yes the language will be English (which means United States). So it sort of works fine.

It doesn't matter whether I'm fiddling with English US or English UK, I get the same results. It's buggy but it's a system that works perfectly for American and British users which is why nobody pays attention to it.

[walt.farrell]

8 minutes ago, MikeTO said:

No, it definitely controls the default language for an Affinity document. 

As I said, it's only tangential.

The UI language will determine the Spelling language set in the Base text style, which all other default text styles inherit from. It may also influence the default Spelling language for text that doesn't have a Paragraph text style assigned, but I'm not sure about that. (And in some ways, Mac and Windows may work somewhat differently in this area as on Mac it's more tied into the system spellchecking functions.