Ignore in Spell Check - Publisher

[iceritchie]

I have a few projects that have spell check concluded. However i get a recurring issue that the ‘ignore’ words previously registered reappear on frequent occasions. Cant pinpoint what triggers this. Words learnt remain learnt but those set to ‘ignore’ seem to reappear after a day or two. 

[walt.farrell]

That would certainly be annoying.

What OS are you using?

Are you sure you're not somehow reverting to an older version of the file? Ignored words are stored within the file itself, and should not reappear unless you go to an older version of the file (before you did the Ignore) or explicitly tell the application to stop ignoring a word.

[MikeTO]

From previous posts it looks like you're on macOS.

Words that have been previously learned should not be flagged as misspelled but there's a known bug in macOS that causes this to happen. I don't know if the same is true for ignored words which as Walt pointed out are stored in the document, because I don't know exactly how Publisher ignores them. But if it's in partnership with the macOS spell check system, it's probably just the same bug. This wouldn't be Publisher's fault - spell checking on macOS has been buggy for years.

[iceritchie]

13 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

That would certainly be annoying.

What OS are you using?

Are you sure you're not somehow reverting to an older version of the file? Ignored words are stored within the file itself, and should not reappear unless you go to an older version of the file (before you did the Ignore) or explicitly tell the application to stop ignoring a word.

Walt - Sonoma 14.1 - On a new Nov 23 MacBook Apple M3, 18GB.

Mike - Thanks for your input. I get what you're saying and to be honest I haven't used it on other MacBook apps so no experience of issues elsewhere. Its a pain but maybe I have to live with it for now.

I guess it would help the workaround if you could mark the entire list 'ignore' each time instead on one by one. Maybe I need to also learn some of these words to reduce the issue. Not ideal but maybe helps productivity.

I guess there isn't an option to learn to a dedicated document dictionary? Would be useful especially when writing technical docs.

 

 

[MikeTO]

4 hours ago, iceritchie said:

I guess there isn't an option to learn to a dedicated document dictionary? Would be useful especially when writing technical docs.

No. Affinity doesn't allow you to add specialized dictionaries to supplement the main dictionary. If you had a 10,000-word list of medical terms, you'd need to learn those words manually.

You can quickly learn a list of words manually with TextEdit. Choose Spelling and Grammar and start spell checking. Just click Learn, Learn, Learn as quickly as you can. This is how I rebuilt my custom dictionary last week, I got through 1000 words in a few minutes. The only downside is that a bug in macOS will prevent it from finding all the misspelled words. Each morning I open my word list and it finds a few more words it didn't find the day before. I hope that in a week my dictionary is back to where it was before I deleted it.

I prefer to use Learn instead of Ignore - while I might not use these terms in another document, there's no way to copy the list between documents. Let's say you used the word superduper in doc A and marked it as ignored but later copied the text or added that page to doc B - the word would be flagged as misspelled. I just find it more convenient to learn every word, the length of the spelling dictionary is not of any real concern.

The faster way to add a long list of terms is to edit the user dictionary directly in a text editor because it's just plain text. Open the file, add the words to the end, alpha sort, save, delete the cache files, restart macOS. However, the user dictionary may not be user editable in the latest Sonoma update - a couple of us noticed this issue last week. (This is why I deleted my dictionary.) I no longer have user dictionary files in my Spelling folder and I've added words in multiple languages. So this option may be gone now.

[iceritchie]

26 minutes ago, MikeTO said:

No. Affinity doesn't allow you to add specialized dictionaries to supplement the main dictionary. If you had a 10,000-word list of medical terms, you'd need to learn those words manually.

You can quickly learn a list of words manually with TextEdit. Choose Spelling and Grammar and start spell checking. Just click Learn, Learn, Learn as quickly as you can. This is how I rebuilt my custom dictionary last week, I got through 1000 words in a few minutes. The only downside is that a bug in macOS will prevent it from finding all the misspelled words. Each morning I open my word list and it finds a few more words it didn't find the day before. I hope that in a week my dictionary is back to where it was before I deleted it.

I prefer to use Learn instead of Ignore - while I might not use these terms in another document, there's no way to copy the list between documents. Let's say you used the word superduper in doc A and marked it as ignored but later copied the text or added that page to doc B - the word would be flagged as misspelled. I just find it more convenient to learn every word, the length of the spelling dictionary is not of any real concern.

The faster way to add a long list of terms is to edit the user dictionary directly in a text editor because it's just plain text. Open the file, add the words to the end, alpha sort, save, delete the cache files, restart macOS. However, the user dictionary may not be user editable in the latest Sonoma update - a couple of us noticed this issue last week. (This is why I deleted my dictionary.) I no longer have user dictionary files in my Spelling folder and I've added words in multiple languages. So this option may be gone now.

Thanks for the comprehensive advise. something to consider.

[walt.farrell]

48 minutes ago, MikeTO said:

No. Affinity doesn't allow you to add specialized dictionaries to supplement the main dictionary. If you had a 10,000-word list of medical terms, you'd need to learn those words manually.

I haven't tried it yet, but this post contradicts that, at least for V1 and presumably for V2 as I don't think things have changed:

 

[David in Яuislip]

1 hour ago, MikeTO said:

No. Affinity doesn't allow you to add specialized dictionaries to supplement the main dictionary.

I think that's a Mac limitation Mike, this windows11 box has three extra dictionaries for en-GB and they all work. Anyway, I'm up to my eyeballs with hyphenation at the moment, that's a proper challenge

 

[MikeTO]

That's great that it works on Windows, but it's not possible on macOS. I did try it out and it didn't work.

Affinity isn't the only Mac app with this limitation since most use the macOS implementation of Hunspell, including LibreOffice. One approach taken by some who want to use a supplementary dictionary is to merge the en_GB or en_US dictionary with the supplementary dictionary (alpha sorting and updating the count at the top of course) and then installing that merged dictionary. That approach works fine although it's obviously less convenient.