Resetting spellcheck for Publisher document?

[Ken Hjulstrom]

Hi,

In a final visual check of my Publisher document, I noticed a new typo that's not a dictionary word that Preflight didn't catch, which makes me think that I may have mistakenly marked that text as "Ignore spelling" while resolving the spelling errors.  Is there any way that I can "flush" my existing spellcheck input for this document so I can have Preflight do a fresh spellcheck using just its default dictionary so I can review the entire document again?

Thanks,

Ken

 

[walt.farrell]

It might be worth putting the text cursor in that word, and checking the Language/Spelling in the Character panel to make sure the Language setting is what you expected.

If it's the correct language, then what options do you see if you right-click on that word? If you've previously Ignored it, then you'll see an Unignore action at the top of the list. Or, if it's something you Learned, you'll see an Unlearn.

This should at least tell you why it's not being flagged.

Unfortunately, if it has been Learned or Ignored I'm not sure there's anything you can do that will "reset" that for the complete document, short of copying the text and pasting into a completely new document.

Learned words go into the Affinity dictionary.propcol file (Windows) or thte system dictionary for the language (macOS). On macOS the dictionary is editable, but you wouldn't have a way of knowing which words came from that document. On Windows, the .propcol file is not editable (but, again, you wouldn't know which entries came from that docuent).

Ignored words go into the Affinity document, but I'm not aware of any way to flush them out except individually.

[MikeTO]

Ken, I believe you're on macOS. If you suspect you learned or ignored a word in a document by mistake, you can right-click it and Unlearn or Unignore it. You can do this even if you closed the app.

But please be aware that spell check on macOS is buggy. Affinity relies on macOS for this and although macOS uses the same Hunspell system that many apps do, there are bugs in the Mac implementation.

• Sometimes words in the main or user dictionary will be underlined as a misspelling even though they're in a dictionary, so right-clicking won't show the Learn command but Unlearn.
• Sometimes words not in the main or user dictionary will not be underlined as a misspelling even though they're not in a dictionary but right-clicking will show the Learn command.
• Sometimes right-clicking won't show suggestions.
• Sometimes words flagged as misspellings in Affinity aren't flagged in other apps using the same spelling dictionary, or vice versa.

These problems are not just in Affinity but in all macOS apps that use the system spell checker. Sometimes these issues can be resolved by right-clicking a second, third, or fourth time. Other times there's nothing you can do to fix the problem.

Good luck.

[Ken Hjulstrom]

1 minute ago, MikeTO said:

Ken, I believe you're on macOS. If you suspect you learned or ignored a word in a document by mistake, you can right-click it and Unlearn or Unignore it. You can do this even if you closed the app.

But please be aware that spell check on macOS is buggy. Affinity relies on macOS for this and although macOS uses the same Hunspell system that many apps do, there are bugs in the Mac implementation.

• Sometimes words in the main or user dictionary will be underlined as a misspelling even though they're in a dictionary, so right-clicking won't show the Learn command but Unlearn.
• Sometimes words not in the main or user dictionary will not be underlined as a misspelling even though they're not in a dictionary but right-clicking will show the Learn command.
• Sometimes right-clicking won't show suggestions.
• Sometimes words flagged as misspellings in Affinity aren't flagged in other apps using the same spelling dictionary, or vice versa.

These problems are not just in Affinity but in all macOS apps that use the system spell checker. Sometimes these issues can be resolved by right-clicking a second, third, or fourth time. Other times there's nothing you can do to fix the problem.

Good luck.

Hi Mike,

I certainly agree with you that spellcheck on macOS is buggy.  In fact, the main "bug" that I encounter is that sometimes Publisher will "forget" all of the "Ignore spelling" settings that I've indicated, which forces me to have to redo the entire spellcheck process, which for the document I'm working on now, about 160 "words", mostly foreign words or fragments of URLs.  Following online advice, I attempted to view my macOS LocalDictionary, at ~/Library/Spelling, and it's empty, probably because I hardly tell Publisher to "Learn" any spellings.

In my current case, I have a document that was pretty much all ready to be sent to the printer, but I found a final typo, caused by me, when I was attempting to use what I thought was a Publisher keystroke command, but "nothing appeared to be happening", when in fact, focus was on a text frame in my document, and my keystrokes overtyped what was originally there.  The typo was easy to fix, but made me realize that there might be other occurrences of this sort of typo, which is why I want to redo the spellcheck on the entire document, since I wouldn't be spellchecking individual words that I wasn't sure were spelled correctly, but instead would be looking for random character typos that could be anything, anywhere in the document.

I also considered exporting the Publisher document to a PDF and spellchecking the PDF, but my version of Acrobat (8.3.1) is too old to support document text spellchecking, and I don't seem to have any other tools that can spellcheck a PDF, and I'm not in a position to purchase a new version of Acrobat just to spellcheck one document.  I'll probably just proofread the entire document manually, unless someone posts a Publisher-related solution here.

Thanks,

Ken

 

[Ken Hjulstrom]

1 hour ago, walt.farrell said:

It might be worth putting the text cursor in that word, and checking the Language/Spelling in the Character panel to make sure the Language setting is what you expected.

If it's the correct language, then what options do you see if you right-click on that word? If you've previously Ignored it, then you'll see an Unignore action at the top of the list. Or, if it's something you Learned, you'll see an Unlearn.

This should at least tell you why it's not being flagged.

Unfortunately, if it has been Learned or Ignored I'm not sure there's anything you can do that will "reset" that for the complete document, short of copying the text and pasting into a completely new document.

Learned words go into the Affinity dictionary.propcol file (Windows) or thte system dictionary for the language (macOS). On macOS the dictionary is editable, but you wouldn't have a way of knowing which words came from that document. On Windows, the .propcol file is not editable (but, again, you wouldn't know which entries came from that docuent).

Ignored words go into the Affinity document, but I'm not aware of any way to flush them out except individually.

Hi Walt,

Since all I do is mark correct, but non-dictionary "words" as "Ignore spelling", it makes sense that these are held in the Publisher document somewhere, and if I could only figure out where, and "flush" them, and rerun the spellchecker, I'd be in fine shape.  Curiously, my upgrade to 2.4.1 resulted in a "flush" of the "Ignored" words, which forced me to rerun the spellcheck, and probably mark the typo I noticed as "Ignore" by mistake.  It's too bad I can't get Publisher to just "flush" these out again on command.

Thanks,

Ken

 

[walt.farrell]

8 minutes ago, Ken Hjulstrom said:

It's too bad I can't get Publisher to just "flush" these out again on command.

Another suggestion. Create a new document.

Then use Document > Add pages from file... and add the complete old document to the new one. That new document won't have the Ignored words list (from a very brief experiment).

[walt.farrell]

Note: In the scenario i described just above, I would probably keep the original document as my "true" document, and just use the new one to make sure of the spelling. But in theory both should be usable.

[MikeTO]

1 hour ago, Ken Hjulstrom said:

sometimes Publisher will "forget" all of the "Ignore spelling" settings that I've indicated, which forces me to have to redo the entire spellcheck process, which for the document I'm working on now, about 160 "words", mostly foreign words or fragments of URLs.  Following online advice, I attempted to view my macOS LocalDictionary, at ~/Library/Spelling, and it's empty, probably because I hardly tell Publisher to "Learn" any spellings.

Affinity does not save learned or ignored words to LocalDictionary. That file is used only by Mac applications that automatically detect the spelling language (and only if that setting is enabled in macOS). That setting will be enabled by default so if you learn a word in Pages, Notes, Mail, etc, it will be saved to LocalDictionary. If you turn off that setting then Pages, Notes, Mail etc will save to language-specific user dictionaries. Affinity always saves to language-specific user dictionaries such as en_CA (English Canada) and it will ignore words learned in other apps and saved to LocalDictionary.

Given that the macOS spell checker is so unreliable, I invested in Microsoft Office and copy my text from Publisher to Word and check it there.

[Ken Hjulstrom]

1 hour ago, walt.farrell said:

Another suggestion. Create a new document.

Then use Document > Add pages from file... and add the complete old document to the new one. That new document won't have the Ignored words list (from a very brief experiment).

HI Walt,

That worked perfectly!  Thanks so much!  I actually tried to move all of the content to a new document, but I tried to do it by selecting the pages from the original document in the "Pages" sidebar and trying dragging and then right-clicking on the selection to look for a "Copy" command, but neither were supported.  I had seen the "Add Pages from File..." option, but I didn't explore it, thinking that it was intended only to import external non-Publisher content, such as Word or PDF documents, but using it to import an entire Publisher document into a new document worked file.  One minor glitch I encountered, though it didn't affect the spellcheck of the new version is that after adding all of the existing document's pages into the new document, for the new document to be an exact copy, I had to delete the initial blank page, which is what the new document contained before I added the existing document's pages.  Also, in my case, the new document started on the left side instead of the right, but this was easy to fix.  Perhaps this was caused by the extra blank page in the new document at the start.  As you suggested, I only used the new document for rerunning the spellcheck, which worked fine.

Thanks again,

Ken

 

[walt.farrell]

You're welcome, and thanks for the added details about your experience doing it.