Affinity Publisher showing 20 'missing dictionary' alerts for languages I haven't used

[Ryan Clarke]

I have cut and pasted a few pages from my Master word document into Affinity Publisher. The majority of the styles remained intact. I adjusted a few. I then set the language, and hyphenation to English UK, for every single style in the Text Styles pane. It has made not the least difference to the preflight errors. Across 12 pages of text I am still getting 20 alerts "missing dictionary for language (ar-SA)".

I have not used any other languages than English UK and certainly not Arabic. I also get one error for zh-TW.

Also, what is the point of these pre-flight errors if they don't show you where the error is originating in the document? Telling me there are 20 errors without any form of assistance is as good as useless.

The same for the 2 alerts of "missing font (lora regular regular)". I click 'Fix', select the font and it just jumps to a random page in the document without highlighting anything. How is this helpful? I just don't get it.

What am I missing?

[walt.farrell]

You can double-click on the message and it will take you to the error. It may be hard to see, as it could be as small as a single character, even a space. 

[Ryan Clarke]

You're right. Thanks.

They are highlighting apostrophes. Does that mean Word has some how added Saudia Arabian apostrophes?

I remember Word replaced straight apostrophes with curly apostrophes at some point. I just checked the apostrophe in the original Word document and it shows every apostrophe as being the same body font, Lora.

How could an apostrophe change over to another 'dictionary style'. An apostrophe in ar-SA is clearly the same as an apostrophe in UK English? If it was a different font style I could understand it. But not this.

How can I fix it globally? Or should I just ignore it?

[MikeTO]

If editing the styles didn't fix it, you can't fix it with Find and Replace because the language won't be in the list of options. But you could select all the text in a story and set Language = English UK. You'd have to repeat this for each story (series of linked text frames) that might have one of these apostrophes in your document.

I have no idea how this could have happened. Could you cut one sentence out of the docx file and upload that docx file for review?

[Ryan Clarke]

Thank you, that's very kind.

The error is bizarre. Not all instances of the apostrophe and speech marks in my document show up as being the wrong language in Affinity.

I have even tried replacing the broken ar-SA apostrophes in the Word document with the versions that show no errors in Affinity. Despite this, the exact same sentences continue to show the same errors, even when I refresh the preflight pane.

The apostrophes are exactly the same, cut and pasted from working versions, but always show up wrong in the same sentences.

I have created a Word document showing two sentences. One that works with apostrophes, one that doesn't.

I have then added it to a sample Affinity Publisher document so you can see the errors.

Dictionary errors Word.docx Dictionary errors.afpub

[David in Яuislip]

If you extract document.xml from the word file (I use 7-zip) you'll see

<w:lang w:val="ar-SA"/></w:rPr><w:t>“</w:t>
<w:lang w:val="ar-SA"/></w:rPr><w:t>“</w:t>
<w:lang w:val="zh-TW" w:eastAsia="zh-TW"/></w:rPr><w:t>t talk?</w:t>
<w:lang w:val="ar-SA"/></w:rPr><w:t>“</w:t>
<w:lang w:val="zh-TW" w:eastAsia="zh-TW"/></w:rPr><w:t>?</w:t>

which matches the preflight errors in Publisher

If the <w:lang entries are removed then it works; I think MikeTO's solution is preferable

ArabicCommasGone.docx

[MikeTO]

As David pointed out, the apostrophes are set in multiple languages which is very odd. 

The easiest solution is to open the file in Word, choose Select All, set the language to English UK, and re-save the document. The file will then import correctly into Publisher.

If the text is already in Publisher you'll have to use the similar solution I suggested above but repeat it for each story.

Good luck

[lacerto]

Obsolete.

[Ryan Clarke]

Thanks all. I will try this later.

I'm very interested in the extracting XML option. I will look that up. It sounds intriguing.

[Ryan Clarke]

Yes, that has fixed it so thanks.

 

On 8/13/2024 at 10:22 AM, David in Яuislip said:

If you extract document.xml from the word file (I use 7-zip) you'll see

<w:lang w:val="ar-SA"/></w:rPr><w:t>“</w:t>
<w:lang w:val="ar-SA"/></w:rPr><w:t>“</w:t>
<w:lang w:val="zh-TW" w:eastAsia="zh-TW"/></w:rPr><w:t>t talk?</w:t>
<w:lang w:val="ar-SA"/></w:rPr><w:t>“</w:t>
<w:lang w:val="zh-TW" w:eastAsia="zh-TW"/></w:rPr><w:t>?</w:t>

which matches the preflight errors in Publisher

If the <w:lang entries are removed then it works; I think MikeTO's solution is preferable

ArabicCommasGone.docx 12.77 kB · 0 downloads

 

It would be very useful to be able to edit errors like this via XML but I cannot get it to work.

I saved the Word doc as XML and opened it in a plain text and rich text editor. I see none of the entries in the format you cite. All I see is the text and nothing else.

I converted the Word file to zip by chamging the extension. My Mac would not recognise it as a zip file. I tried compressing as a zip file and opening it, all I get is the orginal doc file, no XML file.

I'm on a Mac, so it is still possible to output into XML, fix errors and enter that XML into Affinity Publisher?

 

[walt.farrell]

51 minutes ago, Ryan Clarke said:

saved the Word doc as XML

The XML is within your original .docx file. You need to change the .docx extension to .zip then unzip and you should find the XML files.