Publisher version 2 what happens to Learned Spellings when I upgrade or change platform?

[Alan C]

I have a genealogy book in preparation, 350 pages of letter size pages, with hundreds of place and person names that are 'learned' many of the palces names are Welsh. If I upgrade to version 2 of Publisher will all these learned spellings need to be relearned?

Changing platforms - two of us are working on this book, one on Mac one of PC, currently we have two licenses for Publisher, one for each OS, is there a way to snyc the spellings?

[MikeTO]

On your Mac, Affinity uses the macOS spelling checker so any words added are for all of macOS. You won't have to re-learn them for v2.

On your PC, I believe your learned spellings are stored in C:\ProgramData\Affinity\Common\1.0\Dictionaries but a Windows user could provide more information. Dictionaries are easy to move though.

To sync between Mac and PC you'd need to merge your two spelling dictionaries together. They are plain text but they must be alphabetically sorted. Do this on the PC when all Affinity apps are closed and do it on macOS when all apps are closed. I recommend restarting your Mac after messing with spelling dictionaries before restarting Affinity.

Your macOS spelling dictionary is stored in Macintosh HD/Users/<user name>/Library/Spelling/. The file will be something like en_CA or which for me is English Canada.

Cheers

[walt.farrell]

I believe that words you tell Publisher to Learn are stored in the files that MikeTO mentioned, and would be difficult to merge between users. I've never tried, but I don't see a way to do it.

On the other hand, I believe there is a solution that would work easily. Don't Learn the words. Tell Publisher to Ignore them instead. As I understand the processing, Ignored words are specific to and saved within the document.

[Alan C]

Thank you both MikeTO and Walt.farrell for helpful responses.

I did a test on MacOS setting up a new file and put several unusual words in using version 1 of publisher then learned them opened the file in version 2 and they were not flagged, so that worked fine.

I did the same thing again, telling publisher to ignore the words, yes, version 2 doesn't flag them so there's a good workflow. I will look for the dictionaries  on the PC and see what I can find, on balance I think ignoring works better than learning the words, if we had done that initially that's what we would have done.

My colleague who is handling all the Welsh names and places says she is going to 'unlearn' them as she is editing, then ignore them.

We will try a cross-platform test on ignored words next.