Spelling underline not appearing - not solved after all

[MikeTO]

I'm not sure if this started with Sonoma 14.0 or 14.1 but the red squiggles are no longer appearing for misspelled words for me in v1 or v2.

If I click a misspelled word the spelling suggestions and commands will be in the context menu but the red squiggly visual cue won't have alerted me to the misspelling.

If I open Spelling Options, one word at a time will have a red squiggle as it is found by clicking Find Next but the underline will disappear when I find the next misspelled word.

Apps from Apple and other vendors are all working fine, it's just Affinity 1 and 2.

[walt.farrell]

It seems to be working fine for me Mike. Got a sample document?

[MikeTO]

4 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

It seems to be working fine for me Mike. Got a sample document?

Any document in 1.10.6, 2.2.1, or 2.3 current beta. Start a blank document, set to any language, type some misspelled words, and there will be no underlines but right-clicking will bring up the spelling commands. I've cleared user data but since it seems to have struck all of the versions at once I'm leaning toward it being a Sonoma 14.1 issue. If it had happened with 14.0 I'd have noticed it earlier but 14.1 just came out on October 25th.

[MikeTO]

I tried it in a second account on my MacBook in which I'd never run Affinity and it worked fine in that account.

But I can't get the red underlines to appear in v1, v2, or the beta in my main account. To reiterate, it works fine in non-Serif apps in my main account. I can understand that some supporting file could get messed up, especially with all the weird testing I do, but that sort of problem should affect just the one version.

I tried restarting and clearing user data again to no avail. I tried installing a new spelling language but that didn't make a difference nor should it have.

[MikeTO]

Problem solved. I deleted the dynamic-counts.dat, dynamic-text-tmp.dat, and dynamic-text.dat files from my user spelling folder and restarted. Although other apps had no issues with them, Affinity did.

Phew.

[walt.farrell]

I have no idea what those files do, Mike, but it's good you resolved the problem  

[MikeTO]

2 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

I have no idea what those files do, Mike, but it's good you resolved the problem  

They're cache files of some sort. I always advise those editing a dictionary in a text editor on macOS to do so while apps aren't running and to restart after editing. I don't think that was the issue this time and I didn't initially suspect the cache files for this problem because it only affected Affinity.

Spell checking in macOS is buggy but perhaps the bug is triggered by the way Affinity uses the spelling checker. Once it's triggered, using the spell checker in any macOS app will fail to find some spelling mistakes, will flag correct words, and will fail to offer suggestions and options for a flagged word. Deleting the cache files and restarting clears up those issues. Until the next time of course. I had been experiencing those issues again recently and hadn't deleted the cache files yet so I was probably heading toward a cliff.

[MikeTO]

The problem came back. I deleted the cache files and restarted again and that didn't solve it this time, so maybe it's just an intermittent issue. I'm back to assuming it's related to running Affinity on Sonoma 14.1.

Maybe somebody else will report it and then we'll have more data to understand it.

[MikeTO]

And now the underlines are back again. It's an intermittent issue.

[Dan C]

Thanks for your report Mike!

We're certainly not seeing other users report this following the 14.1 Sonoma update, though it's interesting that it appears to affect all Affinity apps across your user account, and not Apple / other third party apps.

I'm not entirely sure how the Affinity apps handling Spelling and the 'red underline' on macOS - so I've requested some further information from the team and forwarded your report to them, to see if we can diagnose the cause of this for Affinity only.

I'll be sure to update you here with any suggestions/information I'm provided

[Pauls]

@MikeTOcould you get an activity monitor sample process report when the spell checker isn't working. Maybe some thread has locked up

[MikeTO]

On 11/7/2023 at 6:12 AM, Pauls said:

@MikeTOcould you get an activity monitor sample process report when the spell checker isn't working. Maybe some thread has locked up

And @Dan C While looking for another dictionary thread I see that I failed to provide you with a process report. I'll try to do that once I figure out the new issue which is Sonoma ignoring existing user dictionaries, at least for myself and one other user. I deleted and rebuilt my dictionary (which I'm sadly an expert at now) and got it back to working like it did before (flaky but generally working) but my user dictionary file has not reappeared. It seems like macOS is storing it somewhere else now. I can't find any other reports of this through Google so perhaps there's something else going on but I thought I'd mention it to you in case you have other users with questions.

 

[MikeTO]

FYI Apple did move the location of learned word lists in 14.4. See this post for the new location:

https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/202141-spell-checking-and-sonoma-update-issue/&do=findComment&comment=1204058

This doesn't help solve the real spell checking issues but at least we know where Apple is storing things again.