Spellcheck and dictionaries using different devices

[Rallef]

Hi everyone,

I'm an Affinity 2.0 user working with Windows and I'm german - hopefully I'm gonna find the right words
I'm writing a technical book with many pictures and many words unknown to standard spellcheck...

Until now I wrote in MS-Word and already added the words to the Office custom.dic spellbook. I work on a desktop and on a powerful laptop computer. MS Office syncs the spellbooks, so everything is ok on both devices.

Now I'd rather work on the book in publisher and - of course - all the "added" words (in MS-Word) are unknown to Publisher. As there is the possibiliy to put .dic files in an additional folder (...Data/Affinity/Common/2.0/Dictionaries) I copied the Office spellbook to there - with no effect. After tryting for half an hour or so, I decided to just add all the missing words manually. That took more than an hour until now - and I don't have the half of it done... 😞

Besides the work I already did, I would have to do it all over again on the laptop??? Definitively NOT!

There has to be a way to add the words or the custom.dic spellbook?! The additional Dictionary-Folder has to be there for a reason?

Thanks a lot for help 🙂

Ralf

[walt.farrell]

20 minutes ago, Rallef said:

Besides the work I already did, I would have to do it all over again on the laptop??? Definitively NOT!

There has to be a way to add the words or the custom.dic spellbook?! The additional Dictionary-Folder has to be there for a reason?

Given your use of "/" in the path name rather than "\" I could guess you're on a Mac. But the other parts of that pathname look like Windows. For a proper answer we need to know for sure, because spell-checking works differently on macOS than on Windows.

In any case, Office .dic files and Hunspell .dic files are probably quite different in format, and neither would work for the other purpose.

[Rallef]

Hi Walt,

thanks for the reply.

As I wrote, it's Windows - I just mistyped slashes instead of backslashes. Sorry...

[walt.farrell]

13 minutes ago, Rallef said:

As I wrote, it's Windows

Sorry; I missed that.

So:

• Words that you Learn during spellchecking are saved in a binary file named dictionary.propcol in your "user" folder. For the V2 applications that's located in %USERPROFILE%\.affinity\Common\2.0\user and you could copy that file from one machine to the other. But as they're all in one file, that means you would wipe out anything unique to the target machine when you do that.
• On the other hand, words that you Ignore during spellchecking are remembered within the document (.afpub file or .afpackage file, for example) that you're working on. So, if you transfer that document from one machine to the other, those Ignored words are known to the new machine automatically. But only within that file.

[Rallef]

Ah - THANK YOU - that's something 🙂
So I can transfer the dictionary to the laptop. That helps for not having to do it all again (still on it)...
Regarding the hunspell: I copied an open-office .dic (should be hunspell?) to the ...\Affinity\Common\2.0\Dictionaries folder, but that didn't work either...

Ralf

[walt.farrell]

5 minutes ago, Rallef said:

Regarding the hunspell: I copied an open-office .dic (should be hunspell?) to the ...\Affinity\Common\2.0\Dictionaries folder, but that didn't work either...

LibreOffice uses Hunspell. I don't know whether OpenOffice does.

But even if OpenOffice also uses Hunspell, if you simply copied the file to that folder it would not work. You need to create the proper folder hierarchy, with the .dic file in a parent folder named with the proper language code.

You can find instructions here:

 

[Rallef]

Thanks again - but I won't be able to find a dictionary including all the words I need anyway...

So the possibility to just add a simple wordlist to an existing dictionary - oder the dictionary.propcol - would be very helpful.

I'm nearly done adding all the words now - hopfully there won't be any more obstacles so time-consuming...

Best

Ralf

[walt.farrell]

1 minute ago, Rallef said:

but I won't be able to find a dictionary including all the words I need anyway

You could invent a language code, and create a dictionary using that code in proper Hunspell .dic format, and then add words to that dictionary. You could then install it following the instructions in the FAQ. And finally you could create a Character Text Style specifying that Language for Spelling, and assign that text style to any word in your dictionary.

But that's a lot of work.