Spelling Checker in French

[Arthur22]

Hello,

I use Affinity Publisher in French. The only major problem I identified is the Spelling Checker for other languages than French. The special accentuated characters aren't managed properly. With the latest Bêta, things are even worth when it deals with "à". Affinity adds automatically a capital letter after the "à". Moreover, the character " ' " isn't properly managed too.

I hope a better Spelling Checker will be added soon or in the stable version.

Looking forward and thanks for understanding ! 

[Wosven]

Hi,

When does this happen? I don't have this problem. Does it happen with all fonts?

[Arthur22]

I use the font Garamond (size 13), but it shouldn't interfere with the Spelling Checker anyway. For example when you write "à la maison" it writes "à La maison", but only with the latest version (downloaded this morning). In addition to this bug, the apostrophe is a problem too. The software does recognize the word "éléphant" but doesn't recognize "l'éléphant". When I right click on the underlined word, the suggestion is "éléphant". So the word is in the dictionnary but the dictionnary doesn't take into account the apostrophe before. I didn't check for this problem with other languages than French. Maybe the software doesn't provide a fully translated spellchecker for the French version. Hope they will solve this issue for the  completed one.

[MikeW]

Likely the Auto Correct that has been plaguing this build is at fault?

Go to Preferences, Auto Correct, and uncheck the second option (The capitalize the first word in a sentence thing).

Mike

[pdussart]

Dear,

I think spelling check does not work properly with languages other than English (UK).

I am using Affinity 249, with Windows 10. I use primarily French and English dictonaries as available through standard Microsoft set-up.
I am planning to add Dutch and German, as I produce pages in these four languages.
Note: As far as the user interface is concerned, I plan to use only the native English version of Affinity, regardless of the language used in my pages/printouts.

Regarding spelling check, if you select a language in the Preference/Auto correct screen, results vary depending on languages selected (see below).
By that I mean that Affinity finds some lists of wrong spellings (left column) and correct spelling (rightcolums) .
With French, at the top of this list I see:  échaper (left column - wrong spelling) / échapper (right columns - OK) and so on
With German, I see first änlich / ähnlich
With Portuguese, I see nothing

In French, If I spell a word wrong (a word as existing on the Affinity list), whatever you do, the checker always underlines the text in red (all wrong).

If you go back to Preference/Auto correct, it shows English.

Conclusions:

1) it seems that there is a list of 7 languages (in this "strange - non alphabetical" order: German, English (UK), English (US), Spanish (Spain), French (France), Italian, Portuguese (Brazil)

2) Four word llists seem good enough for tests (English (2) , French, German).
Some are incredibly short and useless (Spanish, Italian).
Portuguesse is empty and useless)

3) it seems that there is no way to use the spelling check for any language but English(UK). If you select another language, Affinity goes back to English.

4) I am not keen to load myself dictionaries, as this is prone to mistakes. Standard sets should be provided by Affinity to start with the tests of spelling check abilities (the 7  languages mentioned above ?)

4) It would be wise to add some warnings/explanation as part of the first screen  describing the beta (not for production, etc)

Regards, Philippe

[MikeW]

21 minutes ago, pdussart said:

...

4) It would be wise to add some warnings/explanation as part of the first screen  describing the beta (not for production, etc)

This is communicated well in the beta forum for each release:

Quote

As this is a beta it is considered to be not suitable for production use. This means that you should not attempt to use it for commercial purposes or for any other activity where you may be adversely affected by the application failing, including the total loss of any documents.

 One will always need to add dictionaries. It would not be reasonable for Serif to include every single Hunspell dictionary/hyphenation package to the installer. Now, a screen for picking the desired modules during installation where languages could be selected, which then would be downloaded and installed during installation would be nice. But there are too many to just include and wouldn't make sense to install for every user.

As localization expands, it would be likely that these modules for supported languages are installed automatically.

All that said, the quality of hits/misspellings are probably the (current) fault of how spelling works in Affinity products and the actual Hunspell modules themselves. Most all Hunspell modules are the work of OpenSource origination and/or work and that can lead to varying qualities.

[MikeW]

43 minutes ago, pdussart said:

...

Regarding spelling check, if you select a language in the Preference/Auto correct screen, results vary depending on languages selected (see below).
By that I mean that Affinity finds some lists of wrong spellings (left column) and correct spelling (rightcolums) .
With French, at the top of this list I see:  échaper (left column - wrong spelling) / échapper (right columns - OK) and so on
With German, I see first änlich / ähnlich
With Portuguese, I see nothing

...

As regards languages, for the different languages I use (French, German and my language, US English) I set the paragraph styles to the appropriate language and then the spell checker will switch between the languages as defined in the paragraph style. So I have duplicates of the appropriate paragraph/character styles for each language in the document, all based upon the English version with the only differences found in the Language section of the style. That way if the other parameters of the controlling style change, these changes automatically change in the language variant styles as well but retain the Language differences.

As regards Portuguese, the Hunspell spelling and hyphenation I downloaded for a different user seems to work OK. In the screen shots below, I show the only flagged words on the page, as well as a thumbnail-sized image of the page itself. The text is a sample page of Portuguese I took off the Internet.

Mike

[walt.farrell]

4 hours ago, pdussart said:

Regarding spelling check, if you select a language in the Preference/Auto correct screen, results vary depending on languages selected (see below).
By that I mean that Affinity finds some lists of wrong spellings (left column) and correct spelling (rightcolums) .
With French, at the top of this list I see:  échaper (left column - wrong spelling) / échapper (right columns - OK) and so on
With German, I see first änlich / ähnlich
With Portuguese, I see nothing

Autocorrect and spell checking are two different functions. The Autocorrect section of Preferences lets you setup a specific list of common corrections needed for a language, and there are multiple lists available, one per language.

But you need to tell Publisher what language your text is written in. By default Publisher will assume it's the same as your UI Language.

If you want to have text in some other language, you specify the language in the Character panel, or by assigning a paragraph style with that language specified. Then Publisher will know what language to use for both spell checking and autocorrection.

There are also settings for hyphenation which you'll also want to specify.

[pdussart]

Walt,

Thank you.

I was assuming  that some kind of global setting was taking place through the Preferrence/ Autocorrect setting.
So I suppose that this screen is "just" to be used to Add/Modify spelling check/replacement definitions.

I am still a little bit confused:

within Text/Text styles you can define  language/hyphenation settings either through Character or Paragraph style settings
but
on the Studio you can only use the Character settings, NOT the Paragraph ones to manage language, etc

Regards, Philippe

[walt.farrell]

1 hour ago, pdussart said:

was assuming  that some kind of global setting was taking place through the Preferrence/ Autocorrect setting.
So I suppose that this screen is "just" to be used to Add/Modify spelling check/replacement definitions.

Correct.

1 hour ago, pdussart said:

within Text/Text styles you can define  language/hyphenation settings either through Character or Paragraph style settings
but
on the Studio you can only use the Character settings, NOT the Paragraph ones to manage language, etc

That's right. On the Studio you would specify the language in the Character settings. If you've used Paragraph Styles and included the language setting in your Paragraph Style then you do that while definin that text style. Note that Hyphenation settings are in the Paragraph panel. I questioned that once, but I've forgotten the explanation. Sorry.