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Affinity Publisher: Set language of imported PDF?


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I have some PDFs created in other applications that have no language set for the text. When I open them in Affinity Publisher, it applies a language to them. And it's often the wrong language. For example, if I open a Spanish language document, Affinity Publisher will apply English, so all the text gets flagged up a spelling error. 

How can I control which language is applied?

I know I can select the text on the page and then go to and character > language and change the language manually. However, some of my PDFs have hundreds of pages, so I don’t want to be spending all my time doing that for each page. It would be nice if there was a way to control the language that is applied when Publisher first opens (or imports) the PDF. 

Also, in this post, I am referring to Publisher's ability to edit PDFs and not the separate option of having PDFs imported through pass-through where the PDF is displayed without its contents being editable. 

Thanks in advance!

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Text in PDF files does not have a language specified, as far as I know.

So, in an Affinity application, you would have to Select all the text, and then specify a language using the Character panel, as you mentioned. But as you've found, the text frames on each page are not connected, so a simple Select All won't work. You might be able to use the Select menu and select all the text or all the text frames (I'm away from my desktop machines right now, and can't check until later). If that doesn't work, in Publisher you could use Find and Replace, but I'll also need to provide more on that later.

Alternatively, and easier if you don't care about the spelling, you could simply disable Text > Spelling > Check Spelling while typing, if you just want to get rid of the red lines.

Edit: Yes, you can use Select > Select Object > Frame Text and change the spelling in one operation.

 

Edited by walt.farrell
Confirming way to select all the text.

-- Walt
Designer, Photo, and Publisher V1 and V2 at latest retail and beta releases
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Mac:  2023 M2 MacBook Air 15", 16GB memory, macOS Sonoma 14.7

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Or you can zoom out at the max and select all objects with your mouse, then change the language. 

Affinity Suite 2.5 – Monterey 12.7.5 – MacBookPro 14" 2021 M1 Pro 16Go/1To

I apologise for any approximations in my English. It is not my mother tongue.

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