Completed pre-flight spelling checks not saved

[Marathon1908]

I am working on MAC OS Ventura 13.6.7 with Affinity Publisher 2.5.2 preparing 18 illustrated book chapters (not yet transferred to book).  All pre-flight checks have been completed and fixed and the files saved. However after quitting Publisher when the files are re-opened all the corrections to spellings have been lost.  There may be more than 100 each chapter, and there are a lot of words not in a standard dictionary and a lot of names - the worst are things like web addresses - some have been ignored, some have been learnt. I can find no way of accepting all at once to restore the situation.  All I can do is ignore them.

No file image is attached - it would just be a long list of spelling errors.

[walt.farrell]

3 hours ago, Marathon1908 said:

No file image is attached - it would just be a long list of spelling errors.

But the exact error message text is sometimes useful, so it would be nice to have one showing which variant of the message you're getting.

Question: are you working with a Book file and chapter files? Or are these all individual files not organized into a Book file? If you're using a Book file, do you have the Book and the chapters open?

 

[MikeTO]

All spelling corrections have been lost or just some?

Affinity uses the spell checker built into macOS which is horrendously buggy. It just doesn't work properly when dealing with large amounts of text and there is nothing Serif can do to fix this, Apple needs to fix the problems. I have hundreds of thousands of words in both Publisher and Apple Notes and run into this bug every single day in both applications. The symptoms of the bug include:

• Some words I have added to the dictionary have red underlines - it's like the spell checker forgot them. Tomorrow they might come back and different words will be forgotten.
• Misspelled words I have not added to the dictionary do not have red underlines.
• Clicking a red underlined word does not display the Learn and Ignore commands.
• Clicking a learned word does not display the Unlearn command.
• The same word will be underlined as a misspelling in Publisher but not in another app like Notes and vice versa.

There's no workaround for this. I use macOS spell checking for my first review but I always copy my text over to Microsoft Word and spell check it there, too. Microsoft doesn't use the macOS spell checker and uses a completely different dictionary system which has far more words than the macOS dictionary. It will find words that macOS missed but also accept words that aren't in the macOS dictionary. Using both spell checkers gives me more confidence that my spelling is correct.

[Marathon1908]

Mike, I understand this, but I don't see that it explains why when I have completed the pre-flight spelling checks and told it to ignore the unusually spelt words and got a clean bill of health (green tick), after I've saved it and then reopened it it forgets all the instructions and lists them as errors all over again.  I attach a screen print this time.  All the words are from documents going back to the sixteenth century, all are as spelt originally, AFpub has been told to ignore all of them, but won't.  The instruction to ignore them has been lost which surely is an AFpub issue.  I might add that most of them were corrected in the MS Word document placed in AFpub, so they have gone through both dictionaries.

[MikeTO]

Did you click Ignore and not Learn?

Ignored words are saved in the document and not in the custom spelling dictionary so they apply only to this document. However, the issue you're experiencing still shouldn't happen.

Double-click one of the preflight spelling errors. When you find the word, right-click it and see what the options are. Do you see Ignore or Unignore? (If you don't see either, right-click it repeatedly until the options show up, that's the bug in macOS.)

[Marathon1908]

Mike, I chose ignore because those words only occur in this chapter.  Microsoft's dictionary for Word has a limit which I've reached, so I'm in the habit of ignoring very rare words.  If they do turn up in another chapter I can ignore them again.  Following your message I changed a couple of words from ignore to learn.  Saved the file, closed it, quit AFpub, re-opened it and reopened the file, and it had recognised the learned words, so it is only ignored words within a document that it does not remember for that document. I would not expect it to recognise ignored words from one document in another.

[MikeTO]

How many words do you think you ignored? I wonder if you've hit some internal limit (although Affinity in general has very few limits).

Is the problem after closing and opening the document or after restarting Publisher?

Please try this test.

1. Open the doc. Find one of these previously ignored but now forgotten words. Ignore it again. Save and close. (And restart the app if restarting it is what triggers the issue.)
2. Open the doc. Is it still ignored? 
3. Assuming the word won't stay ignored, ignore it again. Now copy a range of text including the word (it doesn't matter but copy from the word before to the word after). Create a new document, draw a frame, and paste the text. Right-click the word and Ignore it again - it's a new doc so it won't have been ignored already. Save and close. (And restart the app if...)
4. Open the new doc. Is it still ignored in this one? There is only one ignored word in this doc so this will test whether the issue is specific to your other document and needs to be reviewed by Serif.

Good luck!

[Marathon1908]

Mike, I'll try this in the next day or so - busy for the time being.

[Marathon1908]

Mike,  I've now done a couple of short tests, and ignored words are being remembered, even after quitting and re-opening AFpub.  Two things: firstly my AFpub 2.5.2 went through an unstable period when all sorts of things stopped working - even resizing text boxes.  The other functions were eventually restored, but not forgotten words.

Secondly, I've just installed 2.5.3 - the link to what's new didn't work, but maybe that upgrade corrected the problem.  Over all my chapters I have hundreds of words to ignore.  I stopped the task awaiting developments.  I'll now resume and fingers crossed doing it once will be enough.  If not, I'll be back!

Thanks for your help

[Marathon1908]

Mike, sadly I'm back.  I mentioned AFpub was misbehaving.  Yesterday was bad and eventually it completely froze my Mac.  It would not even force quit - I had to power off.  I'm sending a separate crash report on that.  Overnight I upgraded to Sonoma (I had delayed for various reasons) to see if that helped.  I haven't yet tested crashability but for every one of the book chapters I've been working on AFpub has failed to remember words I told it to learn as well as those I told it to ignore.  That is hundreds of words.  I am back to square one.  Apart from going through to check for genuine spelling mistakes I shall just ignore the huge lists and wait and see what happens when I combine the chapters into a book.

No-one else has come in to say they are suffering the same problem, but this seems to me a definite bug.

[Hangman]

Hi @Marathon1908,

This problem may be down to a change made in Sonoma which will also affect 14.5...

In the recent MacOS 14.4.1 update Apple has changed the location of where the learned words in the Affinity apps are stored, the learned words are now written to a file that corresponds to your Mac default language for example for UK English the file is called en_GB and this can be found in the location

~/Library/Group Containers/group.com.apple.AppleSpell/Library/Spelling/

I'm slightly unsure but I 'assume' that if you open your Publisher file run 'Spelling Options' and learn the first relevant word this will generate a new en_GB file (or equivalent for your language).

If you then Quit Publisher, open both your existing learned words file (assuming the update to Sonoma doesn't overwrite it) which I think is located at ~/Library/Spelling/LocalDictionary in earlier versions of macOS as well as the newly created en_GB (or equivalent) learned words file in TextEdit and copy the content from the old file to the new file, saving the new file with Cmd S, I would 'hope' that all your learned words are then picked up again automatically after relaunching Publisher and opening your Publisher file/s so you don't need to start from scratch...

Could you give that a go and see whether or not it works...

[Marathon1908]

Hangman,

I have found my local dictionary (Word icon but opens in text edit)  That has not been updated since 22 May, and does not includes words I have asked it to remember since then.  I have not found an existing en_GB file neither a finder search nor a spotlight search pick it up. There are a couple of dat files in the spelling folder but I can't open them.

I did try asking AFpub to learn a word and it did indeed create a new en_GB file with just that word.

I also tried finding one of those learned words 'Northmill' using Spotlight. It is not in the local dictionary.  Spotlight found it in several Word documents but clearly did not search the AFpub files, and did not come up with it in an en-GB file.

Interestingly although it is not in local dictionary, when I open a word document with it in it is not underlined, so it must be stored somewhere.

There is clearly something in your suggestions but I need to find where the learned words have been stored and I don't know how to do that. Can you help further please?

[Hangman]

Hi @Marathon1908,

12 minutes ago, Marathon1908 said:

did try asking AFpub to learn a word and it did indeed create a new en_GB file with just that word.

That is the expected behaviour...

28 minutes ago, Marathon1908 said:

Interestingly although it is not in local dictionary, when I open a word document with it in it is not underlined, so it must be stored somewhere.

I think that suggests 'Automatic by Language' isn't enabled under the macOS Settings so the learned words are likely saved to a language-specific dictionary such as en_GB under ~/Library/Spelling

Do you have such a file located there? If so are any of your previously learned words located in that dictionary?

 

[MikeTO]

I always recommend turning off Automatic By Language - I want the words Affinity learns to be available in all applications, and no Apple application will know them by default unless Automatic By Language is disabled. I'm not dissing the Automatic By Language feature - it's probably perfect for people who don't use professional applications and specify the language, but for us, it just gets in the way.

There were two of us in this forum who had this problem with our existing learned words not being migrated to Apple's new location for learned words - perhaps you're number three. If it happened to everybody there would have been a lot of shouting about it by now so it must not be a widespread bug.

I chose to re-learn all 1000+ words manually rather than editing the file. I have edited that file many times but I didn't know what else Apple had changed so I played it safe. I just opened the old learned words dictionary in TextEdit and used spell check in it to quickly re-learn all the words. Note that due to the existing bugs in macOS spell checking, it didn't flag every one of those words as misspelled that day and it took a few days for them to be noticed as spelling errors so I could re-learn them.

Good luck!