Spell checking and Sonoma update issue

[MikeTO]

9 hours ago, Demonskunk said:

I'm not sure if this should go into Bugs, but the update seems to have wiped my custom dictionary. All of the weird aliem words in my document are reading as red squiggly all of a sudden.

@Demonskunk I'm replying to your post in the Affinity Publisher 2 for macOS - (2.4.2) thread so we're not cluttering up that announcement post.

Are you on Sonoma 14.4.1? When I installed that update, my custom user spelling dictionary stopped working. This happened when I was using 2.4.1, not after installing 2.4.2. This is a macOS bug and not an Affinity bug because the words are flagged as mistakes in every app and not just Affinity. If I open my user dictionary in TextEdit, it will flag almost all of the words as mistakes.

I've been unable to resolve the issue and will need to devote a few hours to testing before I file a bug report with Apple. I will delete my dictionary, restart, and then rebuild the dictionary word by word to see what happens and when/if it breaks again. This will be tedious because I have 1100+ words in my dictionary. (I have a lot of words because Affinity lacks the ability to ignore capitalized words and my books are filled with people and place names.)

How many words do you have in your dictionary? You can find out by choosing Go > Go To Folder with the macOS Finder and entering ~/Library/Spelling - this will open the Spelling folder where your custom dictionary is located. It will be named something like en_CA (English Canada), en_GB (English Great Britain), en_US (English US)... Double-click that file to open it in TextEdit. Select all and copy and then paste it into something like Affinity Publisher and click the word count to see the line count. (Or into Numbers or any app that can count lines.)

Cheers

[R C-R]

4 hours ago, MikeTO said:

I'm replying to your post in the Affinity Publisher 2 for macOS - (2.4.2) thread so we're not cluttering up that announcement post.

??? This looks like a new, one post topic started by you, not a reply to an existing topic. So I am not sure @Demonskunk will see it.

[MikeTO]

1 hour ago, R C-R said:

??? This looks like a new, one post topic started by you, not a reply to an existing topic. So I am not sure @Demonskunk will see it.

I replied to them in the original post, linked to this post here, and tagged them.

 

[walt.farrell]

5 hours ago, R C-R said:

So I am not sure @Demonskunk will see it.

With the default forum settings as I understand them, the tagging and quoting will notify the user at least in the forums. I'm not sure if that would include an email notification by default, though.

[R C-R]

9 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

With the default forum settings as I understand them, the tagging and quoting will notify the user at least in the forums. I'm not sure if that would include an email notification by default, though.

I could be wrong but I think one has to opt in for that.

[Demonskunk]

10 hours ago, MikeTO said:

@Demonskunk I'm replying to your post in the Affinity Publisher 2 for macOS - (2.4.2) thread so we're not cluttering up that announcement post.

Are you on Sonoma 14.4.1? When I installed that update, my custom user spelling dictionary stopped working. This happened when I was using 2.4.1, not after installing 2.4.2. This is a macOS bug and not an Affinity bug because the words are flagged as mistakes in every app and not just Affinity. If I open my user dictionary in TextEdit, it will flag almost all of the words as mistakes.

I've been unable to resolve the issue and will need to devote a few hours to testing before I file a bug report with Apple. I will delete my dictionary, restart, and then rebuild the dictionary word by word to see what happens and when/if it breaks again. This will be tedious because I have 1100+ words in my dictionary. (I have a lot of words because Affinity lacks the ability to ignore capitalized words and my books are filled with people and place names.)

How many words do you have in your dictionary? You can find out by choosing Go > Go To Folder with the macOS Finder and entering ~/Library/Spelling - this will open the Spelling folder where your custom dictionary is located. It will be named something like en_CA (English Canada), en_GB (English Great Britain), en_US (English US)... Double-click that file to open it in TextEdit. Select all and copy and then paste it into something like Affinity Publisher and click the word count to see the line count. (Or into Numbers or any app that can count lines.)

Cheers

I have between 414 and 432 words in my en dictionary file. Affinity Publisher is seeing all of the ones that are visible in the box as red squiggly.

I didn't use Publisher 2.4.1 because I was waiting for the bug fixes in 2.4.2 so I'm not sure if I had the same problem.

TextEdit sees the words as misspellings because they're nonsense alien words, so I expect that.

[MikeTO]

27 minutes ago, Demonskunk said:

TextEdit sees the words as misspellings because they're nonsense alien words, so I expect that.

You shouldn't expect that, TextEdit and all Apple applications use the same spell checker as Affinity, with the same custom dictionary of learned words. If you learn a word in one application, it will be learned in all applications that use the macOS spell checker.

However, Affinity always saves learned words to a language-specific custom dictionary. If you're in the US it will be named en_US. If you're in Canada it will be en_CA. By default, most macOS apps save learned words to a custom dictionary shared between languages, a file named LocalDictionary. This isn't very helpful for those of us working in Affinity so I recommend changing the setting if you haven't already. Go to the Apple menu, choose System Settings, search for spelling, select Spelling and Prediction, and then from the Spelling list, change it from Automatic By Language to English to U.S. English, Canadian English, or whatever language you normally use in Affinity. Once you've done this, words you learn in Affinity will be learned in TextEdit and vice versa.

Once you've done that, repeat the test of copying the words from your custom dictionary to TextEdit. They will likely all be underlined but they should not be because now TextEdit is using the same custom dictionary.

This started with macOS 14.4.1.

[Demonskunk]

23 hours ago, MikeTO said:

You shouldn't expect that, TextEdit and all Apple applications use the same spell checker as Affinity, with the same custom dictionary of learned words. If you learn a word in one application, it will be learned in all applications that use the macOS spell checker.

However, Affinity always saves learned words to a language-specific custom dictionary. If you're in the US it will be named en_US. If you're in Canada it will be en_CA. By default, most macOS apps save learned words to a custom dictionary shared between languages, a file named LocalDictionary. This isn't very helpful for those of us working in Affinity so I recommend changing the setting if you haven't already. Go to the Apple menu, choose System Settings, search for spelling, select Spelling and Prediction, and then from the Spelling list, change it from Automatic By Language to English to U.S. English, Canadian English, or whatever language you normally use in Affinity. Once you've done this, words you learn in Affinity will be learned in TextEdit and vice versa.

Once you've done that, repeat the test of copying the words from your custom dictionary to TextEdit. They will likely all be underlined but they should not be because now TextEdit is using the same custom dictionary.

This started with macOS 14.4.1.

Some of the words are underlined in Text-Edit, some of them aren't. I think the ones I've been slowly telling Affinity to re-learn are showing up as fine.

But Affinity is no longer showing my words as wrong.

Edit: I was wrong, Affinity just took a little while to recognize that it didn't recognize the words.

[MikeTO]

12 hours ago, Demonskunk said:

Edit: I was wrong, Affinity just took a little while to recognize that it didn't recognize the words.

That's a longstanding bug in macOS spell checking, it's not necessarily Affinity. The same thing happens in all apps.

I've finished my testing. I backed up my user dictionary, deleted it, and restarted macOS. I opened the backup copy of the dictionary in TextEdit and one by one learned all the words that the spell checker flagged as misspelled. Even though I opened a list of words that had been previously flagged as misspelled, the spell checker didn't catch them all - this is another longstanding bug in macOS spell checking. It will find most of them all at once but then it will find a few words here and there over the next several days.

After learning 1000+ words, I left it for a day. I restarted macOS, spell checked, and it found a few more words. Left it for another day, restarted, spell checked, and it found a couple more words.

There are still misspellings the macOS spell checker hasn't found yet but at least it's back to working again the way it used to and words in the user dictionary are no longer being flagged as misspellings. I wish Apple would fix this properly.

[MikeTO]

Did Apple move the location of user dictionaries in macOS? The issue above was that like DemonSkunk, my user dictionary (en_CA) seemed to be ignored, all of my learned words were flagged as mistakes in all apps using macOS Hunspell dictionaries, not just Affinity. This seemed to start with the macOS 14.4.1 update but that could have been a coincidence.

As I've done many times over the years while testing the dictionaries, I deleted the contents of my spelling folder and restarted macOS. I re-learned all 1100 words manually, spell checking a backup of the previous user dictionary in TextEdit to quickly learn all the words. macOS failed to find all the misspellings on the first go but each day seems to find a couple more. It has settled down now.

The curious part is that my user dictionary file en_CA has not re-appeared in the Spelling folder. I've done this so many times and it re-appeared very quickly in the past. I've restarted macOS multiple times over five days and it has not re-appeared. Nor has the fr_FR or LocalDictionary files in which I learned some test words. I also tried it in another user account on my computer, without deleting the existing user dictionary files, and they were not updated by macOS.

But yet it's working, the words won't be flagged as mistakes and macOS will offer to Unlearn them if I right-click them. Did Apple move where macOS stores user dictionaries? It seems like they would have migrated the existing lists rather than forcing us to re-learn the words. Or maybe they did and mine just didn't work. It is probably larger than most user dictionaries. They're not hidden, I checked for that.

The Dynamic-Counts file lists the dictionaries you've created and provides an integer value for each, presumably information for accessing cached dictionary data. The numbers reflect the number of words I added to each dictionary from the time I started rebuilding last week so that part of the system is working as it always has.

Could somebody else test this out?

[MikeTO]

I found the answer. As of Sonoma 14.4, Apple has separated where learned words are stored from where users install additional dictionaries. Perhaps users were breaking things when editing the learned word lists.

There's no change to where additional dictionaries are installed, but the learned word lists are now stored here:
~/Library/Group Containers/group.com.apple.AppleSpell/Library/Spelling/

Apple should have migrated users' learned word lists from ~/Library/Spelling/ instead of forcing us to start from scratch, but perhaps this was just a glitch that affected a small number of users such as myself and @Demonskunk.

[DWright]

Hi @MikeTO,

Thank you for this information on the new location of where the learned words are now written to when using MacOS Sonoma 14.4.1

I have also included this information in the How do I add additional Dictionaries to Affinity V2 FAQ

 

[thomaso]

19 hours ago, MikeTO said:

There's no change to where additional dictionaries are installed, but the learned word lists are now stored here:
~/Library/Group Containers/group.com.apple.AppleSpell/Library/Spelling/

As far I remember from earlier threads not only the macOS version but also a / some macOS system setting(s) may influence custom dictionary entries / their storage file path … which might cause more confusion unfortunately. For instance:

[MikeTO]

12 minutes ago, thomaso said:

As far I remember from earlier threads not only the macOS version but also a / some macOS system setting(s) may influence custom dictionary entries / their storage file path … which might cause more confusion unfortunately. For instance:

If you choose Automatic By Language in macOS settings, learned words from apps such as Pages, Notes, and Mail will be saved to LocalDictionary unless you specifically select a language during spell checking. Otherwise, learned words will be saved in a language-specific dictionary. But regardless, the words will be saved to files in the same location so there's no change to the path with this option.

Affinity doesn't use the Automatic By Language option and ignores the LocalDictionary file.