Sudden strange behaviour in Affinity Publisher spell check

[Gianni Becattini]

I get some "spelling mistakes" in pre-flight but when I go to the word that causes the mistake the normal "Ignore spelling" or "learn spelling" options are missing.

This is not true for everything, only for some words.

Could somebody help me? Thanks

[Callum]

Hi Gianni Becattini,

Please could you provide a screen recording or screenshots demonstrating this issue?

Thanks
C

[Gianni Becattini]

Thanks for reply. I found a workaround for this: instead of jumping to the error via Preflight, I use the spell check directly and in that case the options appear correctly.

[MikeTO]

I've reported this issue before but we determined it's a bug in macOS. I resisted that diagnosis at first since I hadn't seen the bug in other apps but I was later able to reproduce it in Apple's own apps. I've spent a great deal of time debugging this issue and I can now reproduce it on demand in any app that uses Apple's spell checker. I just tried it in Notes and Text Edit and triggered the bug in both apps within a minute. I've reported the bug to Apple but I don't think this one is going to get much attention unless a lot of people complain about it.

There are three major symptoms of this macOS bug:

• Words are correctly underlined but not available to Guess/Learn/Ignore - this is very common but it's easy to workaround. Keep right clicking the word repeatedly until the options appear in the context menu. If they don't appear after a good number of clicks try right clicking another word and then return to the first until they appear. There's a second workaround if you get frustrated - copy the sentence to another app such as Apple Notes. After the word is flagged there right click it and Learn or Ignore the word from there.
• Words are incorrectly underlined (the word is already in the dictionary) - the workaround is to ignore it, the problem will resolve itself and eventually the underline will go away. It might take a long time.
• Words are not underlined so you don't even know they're not in the dictionary until days, weeks, or months later when they get underlined - there is no workaround for this one. However, if you want to be sure your document is fully spell checked one option is to copy the contents into another app such as Pages, Notes, or Text Edit and spell check it there. Although it's the same underlying spell check code, Affinity will process your copy in a different manner than Apple's own apps so you'll possibly find some more misspelled words. I just copied 150K words from Affinity to Apple Text Edit and found 5 more misspelled words by doing this. However be cautious, this won't find every misspelled word. I've verified that if you throw hundreds of misspelled words at both Affinity and and Apple app at the same time that neither will find all of them and there may be a few words that neither will immediately find. I'm thinking of reinstalling MS Office just for spell checking since it doesn't use Apple's buggy spell checker.

There's one more bug with this feature that doesn't impact Affinity since it uses only the spell checking half of the macOS spelling and grammar checker - you can't turn off grammar checking in Apple's own apps including Pages, Text Edit, and Notes. They will flag potential grammatical issues even when Check Grammar is unchecked which is incredibly frustrating since the grammar checker has a very high false positive rate.