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

[lucd6634402]

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}

[Steve Werner]

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.)

[Josh Harwood]

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"

[Willi Adelberger]

No, not so.

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

[Camryn5E3C]

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!!!

[KieranBrennanDublin]

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 😞

[jmlevy]

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

[rob day]

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

[CPLJackal]

Thank you soo much! This worked great for me!

[defaultpxlr2xwhj7c6]

This worked for my same issue! So odd that this small burried dictionary overrides all preferences and settings

[Eugene Tyson]

Increase this productivity

Find/Change in Grep

Find

.

Change to

$0

In the Change Format section - select your language

[sherifeight]

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

[sienascarff]

THANK YOU! 

[evan_co]

This!!! This finally solved it! All the other recommendations did not give me the correct result I needed. Wish I could tattoo this on my arm to remember when I'll inevitably need it again some day. Thank you, Eugene!

[Julij Dakskobler]

Great solution, thank you.

[hulmerous]

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 🙂

[Moneck]

Wow, thanks!

[JFPublishers]

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!)

[JFPublishers]

@Josh Harwood you are the one I am thanking here. 

[KT28]

Brilliant! Thank you

[Abambo]

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.

[taywray88]

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.

[Abambo]

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.

[Jongware]

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.

[Dave Creamer of IDEAS]

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.)