[Affinity Publisher] Missing dictionary for language

[Hangman]

8 minutes ago, Ove Steen said:

There is nothing about dictionary folders in Application Settings > Tools. Am I looking the wrong place?

I believe @walt.farrell is referring to /Users/username/Library/Spelling, i.e., the location of the Dictionary files on your Hard Drive.

[walt.farrell]

15 minutes ago, Ove Steen said:

There is nothing about dictionary folders in Application Settings > Tools. Am I looking the wrong place?

Sorry; I forget how different the Mac setup is from Windows, and wasn't near a computer when I posted that.

[walt.farrell]

Also, do you have Danish selected in the list of languages under your system settings, Keyboard?

[Hangman]

FWIW, I tested it using the Hunspell Danish spelling and hyphenation Dictionaries installed and had no issues...

[Ove Steen]

The way I work is this: 

I make diaries from our rather long travels with pictures etc. – 20-25 pages. When I start a new diary, I make a copy of the last one to keep the settings for different paragraphs and other settings for the new diary. And that should keep the settings for spelling correction and hyphenation including different languages. When I did that yesterday the spelling correction was lost. Now I tried again, and it was not lost. So, I wonder what went wrong.

[Ove Steen]

Yes, Danish is selected for my keyboard.

[MikeTO]

Hi @Ove Steen Your keyboard setting has no impact on spell checking, it just impacts the characters you type, not the language they're formatted with in Affinity.

The Danish spelling dictionary is included with macOS. You can replace it with a newer and better dictionary if you can find one and apps will use that instead, but you can't remove the one included with macOS. The Danish hyphenation dictionary is not included with macOS and must be installed manually, but its presence is irrelevant to spell checking.

The only reason I know of that you could get a missing dictionary error for a language that is included with macOS is if you've installed your own dictionary but didn't install both of its files. The spelling dictionary has two files and if you install only one of them you will get the missing dictionary error when importing text.

Using Finder, choose Go > Go to Folder and enter ~/Library/Spelling. Is there a da_DK.aff file? Is there a da_DK.dic file? if one of them is present, delete it.

Is there a da_DK folder (with an underscore and not a dash) with a file named hyph_da_DK.dic inside? That would be the hyphenation dictionary and this is okay. The only file in the da_DK folder should be hyph_da_DK.dic, if you installed da_DK.aff or da_DK.dic in this folder, delete it.

You should restart macOS after adding or deleting dictionaries.

Good luck.

[MikeTO]

The error can probably also happen if you installed your own dictionary but one or more of the files is invalid. It's easy to download an invalid file with Safari for Mac - Download Linked File won't download it correctly, you must use Download Linked File As.

Regardless, unless you found a newer and better Danish dictionary than the one included with macOS, don't install a custom dictionary and delete it if you have already done so.