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imcarey
imcarey
Known Participant
October 2, 2021
Beantwortet

Dictionary changes language for Check Spelling?

  • October 2, 2021
  • 2 Antworten
  • 4060 Ansichten

Hello, using InD 16.4 on Big Sur 11.6. I have a document where I've set the dictionary in Preferences to English USA, and all the paragraph & character styles also have English USA set as the language. However, when I run Check Spelling, it's searching in Arabic. (The text was imported from Word but reformatted with new paragraph styles.)

 

Any suggestions on how to fix this?

 

    Beste Antwort von Peter Spier

    I can reproduce this problem by assigning an incorrect language to the text (language is a text attribute). The dictionary used by spell check will match the language actually assigned to any word. If in fact your styles are set to English, then the language is probably applied as a local override.

    One way to correct this would be to use a GREP Find/Change.

     

    Find .+  (which will find every character)

    In the change format area click the magnifier icon to the right, then choose Advanced Character Formats from the list in the left of the dialog, and finally select English from the Language dropdown.

     

    The downside of this is it will change everything to be assigned English as the languiage, so if there happen to be any words that SHOULD be in another language, they will now be incorrect.

    2 Antworten

    Mike Witherell
    Community Expert
    Mike WitherellCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    December 8, 2022

    This discussion illustrates why it is so important to work by means of clean paragraph styles. The main language should be set in all the paragraph styles. 

     

    Thereafter, whenever there is a foreign-language word or phrase or sentence or paragraph, it should have a Character Style made and applied to that text where the only thing the Character Style declares is the other language.

     

    Publications that don't try to clean up paragraph styles end up having a confusing mixture of paragraph styles overridden by character styles overridden by directly-applied local formatting (where you see the + sign in the styles panels). It makes so much more work trying to untangle these three players.

    Mike Witherell
      G
      Grundoon Groundhog
      Inspiring
      December 9, 2022

      Exactly. But if there is a "global" preference, surely it should override. I did not make a change to "French Canadian" from English. Perhaps the authors of various articles in the publication did for reasons of their own, though they were all writing in English.

      Peter Spier
      Community Expert
      Peter SpierCommunity ExpertAntwort
      Community Expert
      October 2, 2021

      I can reproduce this problem by assigning an incorrect language to the text (language is a text attribute). The dictionary used by spell check will match the language actually assigned to any word. If in fact your styles are set to English, then the language is probably applied as a local override.

      One way to correct this would be to use a GREP Find/Change.

       

      Find .+  (which will find every character)

      In the change format area click the magnifier icon to the right, then choose Advanced Character Formats from the list in the left of the dialog, and finally select English from the Language dropdown.

       

      The downside of this is it will change everything to be assigned English as the languiage, so if there happen to be any words that SHOULD be in another language, they will now be incorrect.

        imcarey
        imcareyAutor
        Known Participant
        October 3, 2021

        That worked, thank you!

        G
        Grundoon Groundhog
        Inspiring
        December 8, 2022
        quote

        OK I've checked my character styles and English USA is in fact selected as the dictionary in the style, but the actual text is mysteriously set to Frenc Canadian (not by me). More to the point, if the Preferences selection is a particular dictionary, why doesn't it work? If the character section of the paragraph style is set to a particular dictionary, why does it change?

         

        Well, there are a few different things going on, here. 

         

        You can set a default dictionary in the Preferences, it's true, but that only affects new documents that you create; old saved documents won't have their default dictionary changed. Similarly, you can go into the Type menu when you have no documents open, and pick a language there; if you start a new document, then new text frames that you make will have their text contents marked with the language you selected with no documents open.

         

        That is basically how defaults work all throughout InDesign. Changing the menus with no documents open will affect all new documents started going forward, but it won't affect old documents. It is quite easy to go back to old documents and change all of the text in them to be marked with a new language, but just picking new default language won't affect those old documents. 

         

        I am not sure why your documents have French Canadian as a default. You can go to the Type menu, when you have no documents open, and pick a different language, meaning that all new documents will have that language as default for text in frames that you create. You might want to check in the language preferences of your Creative Cloud app, to see if you're set to French Canadian by default there as well. 


        Thanks. I tried changing the dictionary with nothing open. I'm using the
        Creative Cloud version of InDesign; is that what you meant?
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