How to install Finnish language support for Affinity Publisher?

[Siivu]

Hi,

I would, too, really need the Finnish hyphenation for my Publisher. I'm just struggling to find the hunspell dictionary file anywhere. All I get is instructions to compile with some coding thing, and I have no idea how to do that. Does anyone have the file in a ready-to-use format?

[Fixx]

Ehkä noita voisi kokeilla: https://www.apt-browse.org/browse/debian/wheezy/main/all/myspell-fi/0.7-18/file/usr/share/hunspell

[johanw]

Tuolla facessa miten sain sen toimimaan
https://www.facebook.com/johannes.wilenius/posts/10221435514069177

[Siivu]

1 hour ago, johanw said:

Tuolla facessa miten sain sen toimimaan
https://www.facebook.com/johannes.wilenius/posts/10221435514069177

Kiitos, tämä auttoi! Ja kiitos myös Fixx avusta. 

Thank you, this helped. And thank you Fixx as well.

[lacerto]

(...)

[pekka kana 3]

Thanks, all the kanssakärsijät. But despite all the helpful file uploads, I can't get Finnish hyphenation to work with any of the provided files
Not with

SET ISO8859-1
TRY esianrtolcdugmphbyfvkwäüößáéêàâñESIANRTOLCDUGMPHBYFVKWÄÜÖ

not with

SET UTF-8

or even without those lines.

Affinity Published DOES notice the language files, as Finnish is recognized as both spelling and hyphenation languages - but the actual act of spelling or hyphenation does not occur!

...any ideas? getting desperate 😥

[lacerto]

(...)

[pekka kana 3]

I checked those settings (check spelling while typing, use auto-hyphenation, language of spelling and hyphenation was Finnish (Finland)), but hyphenation and spelling still doesn't work, not with any of those three .aff file variants I posted above. Which one of them is correct?
And what is the character encoding used in Publisher on Windows, anyway? 

Edited February 4, 2021 by pekka kana 3

[lacerto]

(...)

[pekka kana 3]

1 hour ago, Lagarto said:

In hyph_fi_FI.dic (the file required for hyphenation) i have the following first line:

ISO8859-1

...so it uses standard Windows 8-bit encoding.

Thank you so much!! This was the only change I had to make, now hyphenation works!

Spelling, however, still doesn't (but it's not that important). My fi_FI.aff file still has the USE UTF-8 line. I tried the other variants as well, but it didn't make a difference.
For reference, I attached the files I used here.

fi_FI WINDOWS.zip

[lacerto]

(...)

[pekka kana 3]

2 minutes ago, Lagarto said:

Is it not working at all, or does it just work badly (can you see the red wavy lines for text marked as Finnish, if you enable real-time spelling check)?

I can see the red wavy lines for text marked as Finnish, real-time spelling check enabled.

[lacerto]

(...)

[johanw]

I made quick video about hypenation settings... Pub is amazing quick 467 pages in a second

https://www.facebook.com/johannes.wilenius/posts/10222550667427314

[samin]

On 1/5/2021 at 4:14 PM, johanw said:

Tuolla facessa miten sain sen toimimaan
https://www.facebook.com/johannes.wilenius/posts/10221435514069177

Thanks a lot johanw, I was struggling with finding the correct files.
I was working on an M1 Macbook (which is awesome snappy with Publisher!), but with the dictionary files I had the program would straight up crash when I clicked on the hyphenation selection under Language if Finnish was selected... Maybe 50 crashes later I finished my last assignment by setting the hyphenation to Latin and corrected the rest by hand 😅
But it seems to work now with these files, phew.
Affinity could provide us a more straightforward way to get the Finnish support...

[Severi]

The link to Finnish language files above wasn't working. Any idea where I could get these? Or if you have a better idea how to get Finnish hyphenation working I would appreciate it

[MikaV]

Johannes Wilenius has excellent instructions on his Facebook post (https://www.facebook.com/johannes.wilenius/posts/10221435514069177). You can find it in this chain of posts as well. If you read his Facebook post there is a link to his Google Drive where you can find a zipped file containing files  for publishing  Finnish texts. Instructions are for Mac version but at least hyphenation works in Windows as well. According to Affinity's help (Windows 10 & Publisher v2):

Quote

To install a hyphenation dictionary:

1. In Affinity Publisher, select Edit > Preferences.
2. In the Preferences window, select Tools.
3. To the right of Additional dictionary folder, select Open.
4. Create a subfolder and name it after the hyphenation dictionary's locale ID, i.e. where the dictionary's filename is in the format hyph_xx_XX.dic, the subfolder should be named xx_XX.
5. Place the hyphenation dictionary in the subfolder.
6. Quit and reopen Affinity Publisher.

The newly installed dictionary is available in the Hyphenation pop-up menu in the Character panel's Language section.

This is from Publisher v2 help. So you create a folder named

fi_FI

and add 3 files from the extracted zip file to to this folder. As far as I have used spelling checker, it does not recognize Finnish, but hyphenation works as expected.  

[lacerto]

1 hour ago, MikaV said:

As far as I have used spelling checker, it does not recognize Finnish, but hyphenation works as expected.

EDIT:

English translation: "On macOS spelling check works much better because it can directly utllize the OS inbuilt feature so that there is no need to install language-specific dictionaries." (This is true at least when using recent OS versions, possibly since Big Sur.)

UPDATE: I do not know the reason why Finnish is not included in Hunspell libraries (so they need to be searched and fetched from an unofficial source, and are quite dated and as mentioned, their quality is low even if hyphenation works pretty well). One might suspect that It is because Finnish has 15 gammatical cases that can be used as endings of words, but Hungarian has 28, so that does not seem to explain it. Anyway, the ones we use e.g. with Word, or LibreOffice (which can use "Voikko", a specific high-quality open source dictionary, thesaurus and hyphenation library) are much better than Hunspell libraries in general .  

 

[MikaV]

OK, thanks a lot. I have also M1 Mini and the universal licence for Affinity products, so I will use  Mac instead. I made a simple test with automatic spell checking on (Text - Spelling - Check Spelling While Typing) with same settings that you have been using. Thus I have Finnish Windows 10 Pro version which has spelling suomi(Suomi) setting in the Character Panel. My very poor results as follows:

🙂 The most important thing is hyphenation. I try to avoid typing directly to DTP application any way.

[lacerto]

20 minutes ago, MikaV said:

🙂 The most important thing is hyphenation. I try to avoid typing directly to DTP application any way.

Yes, spelling check is pretty useless also in InDesign (and not just Finnish), at least in CS6 (Windows).

But there might be some setting that you have wrong, since I get the following:

Do you have something like as the first two lines in fi_FI.aff?

SET ISO8859-1
TRY esianrtolcdugmphbyfvkwäüößáéêàâñESIANRTOLCDUGMPHBYFVKWÄÜÖ

[MikaV]

No, the character set was UTF 8 and no TRY clause. I was using the file from Johannes Wilenius. I edited the `aff`-file and changed characters to ISO8859-1 and added TRY block and started Publisher again but still all what I have written has a red underline. I even started a new file but same results. When I add words to dictionary all seems to work properly. Finnish Windows is some times a tricky one because it may use WIN1252 characters. I tried this also (SET WIN1252), but results were the same. Hyphenation file uses UTF 8 and it seems to work properly. I'm no expert in character transformations but I have experienced lots of difficulties when exporting and importing data between databases in Finnish and US English Windows machines even they all share the same locale settings. Perhaps I will conduct a test next week when I am on work again where I have US English Windows.

When I looked `fi_FI.dic` file its anything but complete. I addes some words with learn spelling command and it seems to work OK.

Thank you for your advice in this matter. I'll check the Mac version also this weekend and hope it will work more out of the box.

[lacerto]

1 hour ago, MikaV said:

When I looked `fi_FI.dic` file its anything but complete.

Do you have word count on the first line?

88392
A-klinikka
AA-liike

It is missing from Wilenius supplied file, but I am not sure if Affinity Publisher adds it.

[walt.farrell]

18 minutes ago, lacerto said:

but I am not sure if Affinity Publisher adds it.

Pretty sure Publisher just uses the data that's there.

[lacerto]

1 hour ago, walt.farrell said:

Pretty sure Publisher just uses the data that's there.

I'd assume so, too. The other language dictionaries do have word count on first line, as well, so it seems it is needed for correct operation. Worth trying anyway.

[MikaV]

18 hours ago, lacerto said:

Do you have word count on the first line?

88392
A-klinikka
AA-liike

It is missing from Wilenius supplied file, but I am not sure if Affinity Publisher adds it.

Missing in my file also after adding some words. It seems that there is an additional custom dictionary where Publisher stores added words. Where it is located is not obvious, it can not be found under ProgramData\Affinity. Perhaps in a xml or a dat file in the .affinity\Publisher folder under user's profile. So the word count is not updated in the dictionary file nor any words added to file by Publisher. I changed fi_FI.aff and fi_FI.dic files to versions that can be found from apt packages https://www.apt-browse.org/browse/debian/wheezy/main/all/myspell-fi/0.7-18/file/usr/share/hunspell ( Fixx's post earlier in this chain). They seem to work much better and give sensible suggestions for spelling.

Thus there are some additional repeating blocks of words at the end of fi_FI. dic file. I removed them and updated the word / row counter back to 88392.

To make this easier for other Affinity users I put these files into a Github repository. I hope this does not violate anybody's intellectual rights. Here is the link: https://github.com/MikaVainio/AffinityPublisherFISpelling

Edited December 4, 2022 by MikaV