Bilingual text - spell checking.

[BeachDesign]

I'm making a map with bilingual text. How can I connect my text to both English and French spell checking?

[Old Bruce]

I am fairly certain you will need to do two passes. I would suggest using a text editor for the spell checking and then copy paste into Designer.

[MikeW]

Use two versions of the paragraph styles you are using, one set to Language: English, the other set to Language: French. The spell checking will switch between the two languages automatically as long as the paragraph styles are set to the appropriate languages and those paragraph styles are applied to each language properly.

Mike

[BeachDesign]

That sounds reasonable enough.If I had separate English and French texts that would work well. However, English and French coexist in individual lines such as Sentier Fundy Trail, Rue Main St., Prom Bayview Dr., Parking/Stationnement.

I had hoped I could select the portions of text that are French and assign them to the French dictionary.

[walt.farrell]

4 minutes ago, BeachDesign said:

I had hoped I could select the portions of text that are French and assign them to the French dictionary.

You can, using the Character panel, or a Character style.

[MikeW]

10 minutes ago, BeachDesign said:

That sounds reasonable enough.If I had separate English and French texts that would work well. However, English and French coexist in individual lines such as Sentier Fundy Trail, Rue Main St., Prom Bayview Dr., Parking/Stationnement.

I had hoped I could select the portions of text that are French and assign them to the French dictionary.

Well, then that either takes using a character style set to the language needed or just a lot of manual work using the spell checker and adding the exceptions. And really good proof-reading.

[MikeW]

1 hour ago, BeachDesign said:

That sounds reasonable enough.If I had separate English and French texts that would work well. However, English and French coexist in individual lines such as Sentier Fundy Trail, Rue Main St., Prom Bayview Dr., Parking/Stationnement.

I had hoped I could select the portions of text that are French and assign them to the French dictionary.

OK.

I almost always use tagged text into QXP or ID. I almost never use a process from say Word into either directly. But, the process I use cannot be done in APub.

I don't know where this text is coming from and I actually don't know what Affinity application it is going into. For the below I only tested going from Word into APub. And this mostly works. I cannot place/import the .doc, so I cannot test this route. I have a note at the bottom of this post.

If this text can be copied and pasted into Word (I have no idea if this can be done in other word processors), then one can use Word to automatically use a character style to tag, in this case, French.

In the screen shot below, this is what I did. Small sampling from BD's text. Note that Word still sees the one word as misspelled. APub will also. But where the cursor is (Stationnement) is fine.

All I can do is copy/paste back into APub, the Normal paragraph style is not applied, but the French character style is added to my otherwise simple default styles. In the screen shot below, I have first redefined the French character style to use the French language in its Language section. I then clicked into the word APub (and Word) recognize as French language.

So far so good. However, the word that neither Word nor Apub recognizes as a French word, Sentier, when I do a spelling check is reproduced in the Replace list. I dunno whether that is a fault of APub or not.

In any case, this process could maybe be used. Any questions, just ask.

Mike

I am using the 1.7.0.257 APub beta. On my Windows system, .doc files are not in the Place dialog and forcing import of a .doc file results in nothing imported. Neato!

 

[walt.farrell]

There should be no problem handling two or more languages using either paragraph styles  (for full paragraphs) or character styles (for scattered words within paragraphs) or the Character panel for the occasional oddball unique word.

[BeachDesign]

Sorry, I failed to specify Affinity Designer, desktop, on Mac OS. I'm writing text directly into the Design document. 

So then, it sounds like all U have to do is duplicate my English character style, make the duplicate into a French character style, select the specific French words and assign the French character style to them. Thank you all. I think that sounds workable.