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imcarey
imcarey
Known Participant
October 2, 2021
Answered

Dictionary changes language for Check Spelling?

  • October 2, 2021
  • 2 replies
  • 4088 views

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?

 

    Correct answer 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 replies

    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 ExpertCorrect answer
      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.

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

        An additional downside is that the .+ search doesn't find paragraph or line breaks, so they will remain in Arabic, though that won't affect spell checking since they are not part of a word, but it could potentially lead to the wrong language cropping up again in later editing I suppose.

        Using (.|\n|\r)+ instead of .+ would solve that.

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