Spell check: ignore capitalised words

[David Brear]

When I check a file I get a long list of capitalised words shown as Spelling Mistakes -

Is there any way I can change a setting so that AffPub ignores capitalised words when checking, please?

[MikeTO]

3 hours ago, David Brear said:

When I check a file I get a long list of capitalised words shown as Spelling Mistakes -

Is there any way I can change a setting so that AffPub ignores capitalised words when checking, please?

Hi David, there is no way to direct Affinity to ignore capitalized words. I've requested this feature before, too, and it's my #1 feature request for Publisher.

My book project has hundreds of people and place names in it and I've had to right-click all of them and choose "Learn" to add them to my user dictionary. At least for spelling you can do this, there is no equivalent workaround for hyphenation except to select each of them and format them with No Break. I'm reluctant to do that because Publisher lacks a feature to show no break formatting and it's too easy to click in the text and type another word or two in no break and then later when earlier text is changed after a big white space gap.

[walt.farrell]

52 minutes ago, MikeTO said:

I'm reluctant to do that because Publisher lacks a feature to show no break formatting and it's too easy to click in the text and type another word or two in no break and then later when earlier text is changed after a big white space gap.

You could assign a Character Text Style with both No Break and a background color, then at the end remove the background color from the text style.

[MikeTO]

31 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

You could assign a Character Text Style with both No Break and a background color, then at the end remove the background color from the text style.

I know, I just find it distracting. Instead I've just made a note to check for this as one of my last steps before printing.

Or just keep asking for it in the hope that the feature will be added before I need it. 🙂 

[PaulEC]

1 hour ago, MikeTO said:

there is no way to direct Affinity to ignore capitalized words. I've requested this feature before, too, and it's my #1 feature request for Publisher

But wouldn’t that mean that it never picks up spelling mistakes in the first word of a sentence, nor in any proper noun?  I would have thought that that was more of a problem than adding words to the dictionary when you need to!

[walt.farrell]

1 minute ago, PaulEC said:

But wouldn’t that mean that it never picks up spelling mistakes in the first word of a sentence, nor in any proper noun?  I would have thought that that was more of a problem than adding words to the dictionary when you need to!

I agree.

[David Brear]

As usual, Walt makes a good point. But frankly I've got 300 of these in my 60-page document and life's too short. 

Either exempt '. [capitalised word]', or '.[newline/carriage return] [capitalised word]', or at least an option to mark and 'Ignore all these', here?

[David Brear]

And Hi MikeTO! AND (!)

The other thing is that you can't [right click/Learn] on the Preflight list, you've got to go to the word in the document to do it. 

That's just silly. You can see if it's wrong in Preflight, so why not correct it there?

Been meaning to mention this for ages ...!

[PaulEC]

The thing is that most publications don't tend to include large numbers of capitalised names. If you are going to exclude so many words from the spell check, by excluding all capitalised words, you are quite likely to miss some actual mistakes. It's also worth remembering that spell checking is not perfect so should not be relied on blindly (there will often be "false positives"). I would have thought that it would be easier to just ignore spell check results, or turn it off altogether, if your publication has so many words not in the dictionary! 

Having said this, I suppose that there's no problem in having a way to exclude capitalised words (if enough people think it would be useful), as long as it is not possible for the option to be set inadvertently, as this could result in missing a lot of actual spelling mistakes.

[MikeTO]

Actually, I misspoke, my #1 feature request is for an option not to hyphenate capitalized words because there's no exceptions dictionary for hyphenation. And closely behind would be an option not to hyphenate compound words except at the hard hyphens. I'd still like improvements to spell checking but less so than for hyphenation. There's a lot that could be done, such as options not to spell check capitalized words, email addresses, and URLs. And an option to enforce accents on uppercase letters.

Why would anybody want an option not to spell check capitalized words? Because unnecessary red underlines are annoying when you're thinking. I'd like to keep spell checking on for regular text but I can review all of the thousands of people and place names later. Yes, that means a bunch of words won't get spell checked now but that's okay during earlier stages. This isn't an issue for people who don't work on books with thousands of people and place names that aren't in a dictionary. So yes, this is a nice-to-have, but obviously some of us would like the option.

[Oufti]

42 minutes ago, MikeTO said:

my #1 feature request is for an option not to hyphenate capitalized words because there's no exceptions dictionary for hyphenation. And closely behind would be an option not to hyphenate compound words except at the hard hyphens. I'd still like improvements to spell checking but less so than for hyphenation.

I am not competent enough in regular expressions to write it myself but I imagine what you want could be accomplished by a Find & replace operation combining format and regex.

Something like that:
1º Search for all capitalized words that are not preceded by .?!… + space (thus first words of a sentence will still be checked) and are set with [No Style] character style (hence you won't loose existing formatting)
2º Apply to the result a character style with both spell check and hyphenate set to None.

[David Brear]

You appear to be a darn sight more competent than I am. Oufti!

[thomaso]

On 11/7/2023 at 6:30 PM, David Brear said:

I get a long list of capitalised words shown as Spelling Mistakes

6 hours ago, MikeTO said:

Why would anybody want an option not to spell check capitalized words?

Are you sure they are marked because of their capitals? – To me capitals don't seem to cause a spell check issue:

If just capitals would cause spell check issues: What about the style options Title Case, Sentence Case … and finally Upper Case with SPELL CHECK OF ESPECIALLY LEGAL/CONTRACT TEXT PARAGRAPHS OFTEN PUBLISHED IN CAPITALS ONLY FOR REDUCED READABILITY AND INCREASED CONFUSION.

Strangely, if I switch the text above via the Text menu to "Upper Case" then spell check seems to be fully disabled … while neither "Lower Case" does its first characters of sentences … nor does "Sentence Case" gets the odd capital 'A's marked a issues.

[MikeTO]

They're not marked because of their capitals, but they are capitalized. They're people and place names that are only used capitalized.

[walt.farrell]

45 minutes ago, thomaso said:

What about the style options Title Case, Sentence Case

Those are styling options that simply change how the text is displayed. They don't change the actual characters, and thus don't affect spelling.

[thomaso]

1 hour ago, MikeTO said:

They're not marked because of their capitals, but they are capitalized.

What is the difference between "capitals" and "capitalized"? – Are the possible names of people, geography or companies part of spelling dictionaries at all? To me it appears not to matter for spell check whether I type the names of OP's screenshot with upper or lower case.

1 hour ago, walt.farrell said:

Those are styling options that simply change how the text is displayed. They don't change the actual characters, and thus don't affect spelling.

Not only is the sentence "This is One With typed Caps" in my example typed with shift key and thus not a display/style option but do not get marked by spell check, also is the selected text frame in my second screenshot switched via the style/display option "Upper Case" but obviously does influence spell checking: then none of the words gets marked, even the obvious issues like TÜPO, WHYLE, NAIME that get marked if this style option is not used – as if this "Upper Case" option would disable spell check.

[MikeTO]

15 hours ago, thomaso said:

What is the difference between "capitals" and "capitalized"?

I think this is just a translation issue. You had written "Are you sure they are marked because of their capitals? – To me capitals don't seem to cause a spell check issue"

My reply was intended to state that the fact that they were capitalized was not relevant to whether or not they were flagged as misspelled because they were not in the dictionary.

If you add a word to the dictionary with the Learn command, macOS will add it with the capitalization in your document. While this makes no difference to Publisher because it doesn't have a case sensitive search option, the macOS spell checker does so it might make a difference to some other apps.

[thomaso]

18 hours ago, MikeTO said:

My reply was intended to state that the fact that they were capitalized was not relevant to whether or not they were flagged as misspelled because they were not in the dictionary.

Ah, I seem to have misunderstood this approach and perspective of capitals (… related to their special, seldom use in English / different to German where all nouns start with capitals).

On 11/7/2023 at 9:41 PM, MikeTO said:

My book project has hundreds of people and place names in it and I've had to right-click all of them and choose "Learn" to add them to my user dictionary.

19 hours ago, MikeTO said:

Publisher because it doesn't have a case sensitive search option

On 11/8/2023 at 4:44 PM, MikeTO said:

request is for an option not to hyphenate capitalized words because there's no exceptions dictionary for hyphenation.

How about using the Find And Replace panel with a regex search for capitals [A-Z] ?
Possibly you could use it for easier creation of dictionary exceptions + to avoid hyphenation:

• add an index marker before every capitalized word (or via TOC) -> use this resulting text to copy/paste directly into your custom dictionary file in your macOS library spelling folder?

• add a special character "soft hyphen" before every capitalized word -> and exclude it this way from getting hyphenated?

[MikeTO]

I know I could do it with regex but I'm actually writing the book in Publisher and not importing the completed manuscript, so regex is just a one time fix.

[thomaso]

5 hours ago, MikeTO said:

I'm actually writing the book in Publisher and not importing the completed manuscript,

In this case you can type the additional character(s) before typing capital letters, at least to exclude them from hyphenation with an additional soft hyphen before.

For spell check there might be text files for download and use as your custom dictionary file. For instance this with 466,000 entries (4.9 MB), including (pre-)names (international), acronyms, abbreviations: https://github.com/dwyl/english-words. Or this thread "Database or List of English First and Last Names" appears to contain links to various resource files: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/18391799/database-or-list-of-english-first-and-last-names.

[David Brear]

Additional dictionaries might be useful, particularly a list of British place-names. Come to that, I've already got the Ordnance Survey Gazetteer list.

Can you add or merge additional dictionaries?

[MikeTO]

I know I can insert a soft hyphen but it's just not a natural thing to remember to type it before every single name.

For my particular history book I'd also need a dictionary that contained all the place names for at least the UK and North America which would be so many words that real misspellings would be missed.

I'm just going to muddle through. 🙂 

[thomaso]

4 hours ago, David Brear said:

Can you add or merge additional dictionaries?

Assuming you have dictionaries as supplements for a certain language in mind (instead of installing dictionaries for currently not existing language on your computer), I think there are two ways for example:

• In macOS custom dictionary files get stored in your user library > spelling folder. There you can add a plain text file with any content that will be used for custom spell check (like "Learned" in Affinity). – This recent thread shows details about the related folder & files in macOS (… I don't know how Windows handles dictionaries and custom spelling additions or exceptions):

• In the thread below it appears David managed to make Affinity use an English merged with a Dutch dictionary, simply by adding the two 'NL' files (.aff / .dict) into the English dictionary folder of Affinity in Windows:

[thomaso]

4 hours ago, David Brear said:

a list of British place-names. Come to that, I've already got the Ordnance Survey Gazetteer list.

If you got this list already, what are you missing? If I understand right this list contains "all names from the 1:50 000 scale landranger maps" ?

4 hours ago, MikeTO said:

I'd also need a dictionary that contained all the place names for at least the UK and North America

As said, I think they do exist digitally and thus might be available for download, somewhere. For instance this site appears to sell customized lists of geographical names (though they seem to be meant for photo metadata keywording they may work as dictionary, too): http://photo-keywords.com/keyword-categories.php

Also I think any map service will have and possibly offer what you are searching for (e.g. https://developers.google.com/earth-engine/datasets )

[David Brear]

For UK place-names, check this out :

https://data.nls.uk/data/map-spatial-data/gb1900/

Download available, but I know nothing about it and visionofbritain appears to have a security problem.

https://osdatahub.os.uk/downloads/open/OpenNames

The current successor to the OS 1:50,000 map gazetteer. CSV download 108 MB.