• Global community
    • Language:
      • Deutsch
      • English
      • Español
      • Français
      • Português
  • 日本語コミュニティ
    Dedicated community for Japanese speakers
  • 한국 커뮤니티
    Dedicated community for Korean speakers
Exit
0

How to change the language in InDesign to do a spell check

New Here ,
Mar 02, 2016 Mar 02, 2016

Copy link to clipboard

Copied

Anyone know how I can change the language setting in InDesign? I'm doing up a document in French and need to do a spell check but the dictionary is in English.

 

Thanks

 

{Renamed By MOD}

TOPICS
How to

Views

63.2K

Translate

Translate

Report

Report
Community guidelines
Be kind and respectful, give credit to the original source of content, and search for duplicates before posting. Learn more
community guidelines

correct answers 1 Correct answer

Adobe Employee , Nov 23, 2023 Nov 23, 2023

Hi All,

 

To change the language setting in InDesign for spell check, please try the following:

 

Language as Character Attribute:

  • Language is a character attribute in InDesign, not a global setting.
  • Set it in paragraph and character styles (Advanced Character Formats).
  • Locally adjust in the Control panel in Character mode with the Type tool selected, considering potential multiple languages within a document.

Work with Paragraph Styles:

  • Change the language of Paragraph Styles in Extended Cha
...

Votes

Translate

Translate
Community Expert ,
Mar 02, 2016 Mar 02, 2016

Copy link to clipboard

Copied

Language is a character attribute in InDesign. It's not a global setting.

It can be set in paragraph and character styles (Advanced Character Formats), or locally in the Control panel in Character mode with the Type tool is selected. (This is because you may have multiple language text within a document.)

Votes

Translate

Translate

Report

Report
Community guidelines
Be kind and respectful, give credit to the original source of content, and search for duplicates before posting. Learn more
community guidelines
New Here ,
May 25, 2017 May 25, 2017

Copy link to clipboard

Copied

Hi lucd6634402

I just found the solution to help you (next time), you can easily convert multiple textframes between two languages using the "Find/Change" feature.

  1. Edit > Find/Change
  2. Click the magnify icon next to "Find Format" and then "Change Format":
    1. Define the Find attributes, choose ‘Advanced Character Formats’. Change the language to “English: UK”.
    2. Define the Change attributes, choose ‘Advanced Character Formats’. Change the language to “French”
  3. Check the format settings are correct, e.g. "+ language: English: UK" and "+ language: French".
  4. Press "Change All"

Votes

Translate

Translate

Report

Report
Community guidelines
Be kind and respectful, give credit to the original source of content, and search for duplicates before posting. Learn more
community guidelines
Community Expert ,
May 26, 2017 May 26, 2017

Copy link to clipboard

Copied

No, not so.

Work with Paragraph Styles. Change the language of the Paragraph Styles in Extended Character Attributes.

Votes

Translate

Translate

Report

Report
Community guidelines
Be kind and respectful, give credit to the original source of content, and search for duplicates before posting. Learn more
community guidelines
New Here ,
Jul 20, 2021 Jul 20, 2021

Copy link to clipboard

Copied

I spent A WEEK with my indesign stuck on polish, everything would spell check in polish, didn't matter the document or size, it was stuck in polish. My PARAGRAPH STYES were polish!! No one else had this solution, thank you so much random guy from adobe support!!!

Votes

Translate

Translate

Report

Report
Community guidelines
Be kind and respectful, give credit to the original source of content, and search for duplicates before posting. Learn more
community guidelines
Contributor ,
Jun 10, 2022 Jun 10, 2022

Copy link to clipboard

Copied

can you point me to where I can find this area? I've got Para Styles and Character Styles open but can't see what I'm supposed to do 😞

Votes

Translate

Translate

Report

Report
Community guidelines
Be kind and respectful, give credit to the original source of content, and search for duplicates before posting. Learn more
community guidelines
Community Expert ,
Jun 10, 2022 Jun 10, 2022

Copy link to clipboard

Copied

You must edit each paragrah style and go to the Advanced character formats tab.

Votes

Translate

Translate

Report

Report
Community guidelines
Be kind and respectful, give credit to the original source of content, and search for duplicates before posting. Learn more
community guidelines
Community Expert ,
Jun 10, 2022 Jun 10, 2022

Copy link to clipboard

Copied

Hi @KieranBrennanDublin , Double click the each style and choose Advanced Character Formats to set the Language.

 

Keep in mind the Language property could be overridden, so setting the Language in all your styles doesn’t guarantee the same language for all text. You can try this script , which sets styled, unstyled, and table text to the chosen language:

 

https://shared-assets.adobe.com/link/98453a4b-80c7-49d0-7702-e507d8404479

Votes

Translate

Translate

Report

Report
Community guidelines
Be kind and respectful, give credit to the original source of content, and search for duplicates before posting. Learn more
community guidelines
Community Beginner ,
Jul 08, 2023 Jul 08, 2023

Copy link to clipboard

Copied

Thank you soo much! This worked great for me!

Votes

Translate

Translate

Report

Report
Community guidelines
Be kind and respectful, give credit to the original source of content, and search for duplicates before posting. Learn more
community guidelines
Community Expert ,
May 26, 2017 May 26, 2017

Copy link to clipboard

Copied

Increase this productivity

Find/Change in Grep

Find

.

Change to

$0

In the Change Format section - select your language

Votes

Translate

Translate

Report

Report
Community guidelines
Be kind and respectful, give credit to the original source of content, and search for duplicates before posting. Learn more
community guidelines
Community Beginner ,
Jan 27, 2022 Jan 27, 2022

Copy link to clipboard

Copied

Thank you! that absolutely worked! I couldn't get my spell check off of a Finnish dictionary - tried everything - this worked!

Votes

Translate

Translate

Report

Report
Community guidelines
Be kind and respectful, give credit to the original source of content, and search for duplicates before posting. Learn more
community guidelines
New Here ,
Sep 07, 2022 Sep 07, 2022

Copy link to clipboard

Copied

THANK YOU! 

 

Votes

Translate

Translate

Report

Report
Community guidelines
Be kind and respectful, give credit to the original source of content, and search for duplicates before posting. Learn more
community guidelines
New Here ,
Apr 12, 2019 Apr 12, 2019

Copy link to clipboard

Copied

Great solution, thank you.

Votes

Translate

Translate

Report

Report
Community guidelines
Be kind and respectful, give credit to the original source of content, and search for duplicates before posting. Learn more
community guidelines
Participant ,
Nov 15, 2019 Nov 15, 2019

Copy link to clipboard

Copied

Thanks, this worked for me!

Kind of ridiculous that it takes so many steps for such a simple change. I don't even know how some of my text boxes got changed to Hindi. Makes no sense... then the dictionary doesn't work right... then I have to do this ridiculous workaround. DOH! Thank you though, solved my problem 🙂

Votes

Translate

Translate

Report

Report
Community guidelines
Be kind and respectful, give credit to the original source of content, and search for duplicates before posting. Learn more
community guidelines
New Here ,
Apr 27, 2021 Apr 27, 2021

Copy link to clipboard

Copied

Wow, thanks!

Votes

Translate

Translate

Report

Report
Community guidelines
Be kind and respectful, give credit to the original source of content, and search for duplicates before posting. Learn more
community guidelines
Explorer ,
Jul 12, 2022 Jul 12, 2022

Copy link to clipboard

Copied

You are BRILLIANT!! Thank you for this. I knew I should not have to change all 167 text boxes or 23 styles individually. I am forever in your debt. (In my case the template I used had it all in Spanish so even my cross referencing was in Spanish and nothing else would change all!)

Votes

Translate

Translate

Report

Report
Community guidelines
Be kind and respectful, give credit to the original source of content, and search for duplicates before posting. Learn more
community guidelines
Explorer ,
Jul 12, 2022 Jul 12, 2022

Copy link to clipboard

Copied

@Josh_Harwood you are the one I am thanking here. 

Votes

Translate

Translate

Report

Report
Community guidelines
Be kind and respectful, give credit to the original source of content, and search for duplicates before posting. Learn more
community guidelines
Community Expert ,
May 26, 2017 May 26, 2017

Copy link to clipboard

Copied

My hair grows grey thinking that people set-up documents like on a typewriter. One of the worst sins is not setting the correct language. You can even include non-standard dictionaries, as InDesign uses Hunspell, which is great because even exotic language dictionaries are available.

As stated before, the language of InDesign text is an attribute that is attached to the character. You should set the language as a paragraph style parameter at the very beginning of your work. The language style setting does not only influence the dictionary, but also the hyphenation rules, quotes etc.

If you have, inside a paragraph, a few words of some different language, you should use a character style to mark up those words.

ABAMBO | Hard- and Software Engineer | Photographer

Votes

Translate

Translate

Report

Report
Community guidelines
Be kind and respectful, give credit to the original source of content, and search for duplicates before posting. Learn more
community guidelines
New Here ,
Dec 13, 2017 Dec 13, 2017

Copy link to clipboard

Copied

What if I need accents on my text for words in the Hawaiian Language? Hawaiian is not an option in advanced character format. I do not need it to translate, I just want to properly write the words with their typographical mark. For example aina needs to be 'āina.

Votes

Translate

Translate

Report

Report
Community guidelines
Be kind and respectful, give credit to the original source of content, and search for duplicates before posting. Learn more
community guidelines
Community Expert ,
Dec 13, 2017 Dec 13, 2017

Copy link to clipboard

Copied

if Hawaiian is not an option, you cannot spellcheck, but you still can write the language. And there is an option to install a hunspell dictionnary, if you have one. I think, Mozilla has pretty a lot of dictionaries. I’ve read once an article installing a Luxembourgish hunspell-dictionary to Indesign. If that could help you, I will try to find it back.

You only need the correct character set for this and most probably a keyboard to help you inputing those characters. I’ve typeset Chinese, Vietnamese, Japanese, Turkish and Russian by simply doing copy/paste of the translations of my text I got from the translators in Word. Languages that cannot be checked may be marked with “none”. Works ok for me.

ABAMBO | Hard- and Software Engineer | Photographer

Votes

Translate

Translate

Report

Report
Community guidelines
Be kind and respectful, give credit to the original source of content, and search for duplicates before posting. Learn more
community guidelines
Community Expert ,
Dec 13, 2017 Dec 13, 2017

Copy link to clipboard

Copied

taywray88  wrote

... I do not need it to translate,

Good! Because that"s not what this discussion is about, and it's not what applying the correct language to your text does. It's only for correct hyphenation and for spell checking. You can type any character you want, regardless of the applied language.

Votes

Translate

Translate

Report

Report
Community guidelines
Be kind and respectful, give credit to the original source of content, and search for duplicates before posting. Learn more
community guidelines
Community Expert ,
Dec 14, 2017 Dec 14, 2017

Copy link to clipboard

Copied

If styles were not used, change the language on the Basic Paragraph style in the Paragraph Style panel. (Do this anyway even if styles were used.)

If Styles were used, I would not use Find & Change. Hopefully based-on styles were used. Look at the styles panels and track down the "parent" styles. Change them and any based-on styles will change too. (If based-on setting is set to No Paragraph Style, you will have to change the language on a style-by-style basis.)

David Creamer: Community Expert (ACI and ACE 1995-2023)

Votes

Translate

Translate

Report

Report
Community guidelines
Be kind and respectful, give credit to the original source of content, and search for duplicates before posting. Learn more
community guidelines
Explorer ,
May 25, 2023 May 25, 2023

Copy link to clipboard

Copied

what about parking this smartass setting somewhere where the 5% who juggle 3 languages in one document can google that

Votes

Translate

Translate

Report

Report
Community guidelines
Be kind and respectful, give credit to the original source of content, and search for duplicates before posting. Learn more
community guidelines
Explorer ,
May 25, 2023 May 25, 2023

Copy link to clipboard

Copied

and default a stratforward global autocorrect

Votes

Translate

Translate

Report

Report
Community guidelines
Be kind and respectful, give credit to the original source of content, and search for duplicates before posting. Learn more
community guidelines
Adobe Employee ,
Nov 23, 2023 Nov 23, 2023

Copy link to clipboard

Copied

LATEST

Hi All,

 

To change the language setting in InDesign for spell check, please try the following:

 

Language as Character Attribute:

  • Language is a character attribute in InDesign, not a global setting.
  • Set it in paragraph and character styles (Advanced Character Formats).
  • Locally adjust in the Control panel in Character mode with the Type tool selected, considering potential multiple languages within a document.

Work with Paragraph Styles:

  • Change the language of Paragraph Styles in Extended Character Attributes.

Advanced Character Formats for Styles:

  • Double-click each style and choose Advanced Character Formats to set the language.

Be aware that the Language property could be overridden, so it's not a guarantee for the same language for all text.


Additional Suggestion:

  • Follow the steps in this article for additional guidance.


Thanks

Rishabh

Votes

Translate

Translate

Report

Report
Community guidelines
Be kind and respectful, give credit to the original source of content, and search for duplicates before posting. Learn more
community guidelines