Preflight on imported IDML

[DanielSss]

Hi, 

I've brought a file from InDesign into Affinity via IDML & ran a preflight check and on most every page with text, preflight shows a warning: "Missing Dictionary for language (Chinese: Simplified)". 

The text is in US English. The language & hyphenation dictionaries referenced in the instructions on Github (https://github.com/LibreOffice/dictionaries/tree/master) show no corresponding files for simplified Chinese.

The error messages don't seem to be hurting anything, but they may obscure other errors I'm more interested in catching. I'm working with Publisher version 2.5.7.2948 (Retail) on Mac OS 10.15.7.

Maybe I'm missing something as a relative Affinity newbie--any help on clearing the messages is most appreciated!

[MikeTO]

Hi @DanielSss and welcome to the forums.

If the text on every page is definitely set to English US or UK or another variant and not Chinese, take a look at the master pages. Perhaps there are text objects on the master pages that are set to Chinese. If you change those to English the preflight warnings should go away.

Cheers

[DanielSss]

Thanks Mike! I looked around on the master pages, of which I have only two, one with standard running heads & page numbers (it's a book project), the other blank. All text is US English. I tried replacing symbols on the master pages, like the page number field and a bullet symbol, but that makes no difference. The running head text is English. Dunno why anything else would be Chinese. 

When I double-click the preflight warnings, the referenced text is selected. It seems there's one warning per text style on a page. If a page has a heading and body text, for instance, there will be two warnings. I'm still flummoxed. Any other ideas?

[MikeTO]

I'd experiment with one page. Select all the text objects and set Character > Language > English. If it's already set to English, click it anyway and select it again. Does that solve it? If so, there is a Chinese language character in there somewhere. Another way to isolate it is to pick a page with a warning and delete each of the text objects one by one and see which one clears the warning. If the objects are on the master page, select all the text in the object and delete it to do the same thing, ensuring that the empty frame is then set to English.

Good luck!

[DanielSss]

Magic! You provided just the clue to solve the mystery--thanks so much, Mike.

It turns out that when styles import from InDesign via IDML, the language for checking spelling does not get set, which then apparently defaults to "Chinese: Simplified". After modifying the imported styles to use the English spelling dictionary, & re-running the preflight check, those errors cleared. No Chinese language characters were necessary to create the message.