Adding Welsh language to InDesign

[steveg88017173]

Has anyone successfully added a language to Adobe InDesign? If so, how did you do it? I don't need this for spell checking, but I need to be able to set the document language or paragraph styles to Welsh.

We are getting a lot of English / Welsh dual language PDFs to fix, and while we can easily set the languages in Acrobat, I would like to teach our clients to set the appropriate languages in the paragraph styles in InDesign.

This is easy to do with the built-in languages, but Welsh is not one of them. I have found an Adobe article that says you have to obtain a dictionary in the required language in a .udc file format. However, I cannot find any such dictionaries.

I have found a Welsh dictionary that has files with .aff and .dic file formats, but InDesign does not recognise them.

I found an article titled "Add and remove Hunspell dictionaries". This describes how you are supposed to be able to add new languages. However, this page says to place the files in locations that don't exist on my machine, and all my experiments have failed.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Steve Green

Managing Director

Test Partners Ltd

[Test Screen Name]

Please tell us EXACTLY what locations it says to use on your computer, that do not seem to exist, and post a link to the article you're trying to follow. AND your exact InDesign version. Thanks.

[steveg88017173]

The article is https://helpx.adobe.com/ie/indesign/kb/add_cs_dictionaries.html and it contains a list of all the file locations.

I have InDesign 16.2.1

[Test Screen Name]

Thanks. The article lists many directories and has both Mac and Windows info. Please pick just one and tell us EXACTLY which folder it says, and how much you find of the folder up to that point. Some of the instructions need a bit of interpretation, I can see, so we need to know where you are stuck. 

[steveg88017173]

I have a Windows machine. The articoe says to add the dictinary files to the folder at

%ProgramFiles%\Adobe\Adobe InDesign CC (64 bit)\Plug-Ins\Dictionaries\LILO\Linguistics\Providers\Plugins2\AdobeHunspellPlugin\Dictionaries

I have the required path up to

C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe InDesign 2021\Plug-Ins\Dictionaries\LILO

In the LILO folder, I have the (LILO Resources) folder and the LILO.apln file.

[Test Screen Name]

Not a great discussion, but this one https://www.reddit.com/r/indesign/comments/nkspq4/macedonian_spell_dictionary_install/ suggests there MIGHT have been success after manually creating the folders.

[Joel Cherney]

I think that the location of the Hunspell dictionaries has moved since that helpx article was written, but the article was not updated. So, instead of trying to find an updated article on the Internet that shows me where those files are in 2021, I just search the InDesign folder for the word "Hunspell." Doing that today showed that my Hunspell dictionaries are located at:

%ProgramFiles%\Adobe\Adobe InDesign 2021\Resources\Dictionaries\LILO\Linguistics\Providers\Plugins2\AdobeHunspellPlugin\Dictionaries

I would suggest that you go looking for it in your filesystem rather than go looking for instructions on how to find it. Also, I would suggest that this Sandee Cohen article might be of use; I can't remember how I figured out that the Hunspell plugin wasn't automagically picking up new dictionaries that I put in, but it took a lot longer than it took to read Sandee's article:

https://creativepro.com/adding-hunspell-dictionaries-indesign/

On my install, dictionaries don't show up until I edit the info.plist and restart InDesign. 

[Joel Cherney]

I also found this feature request that you might want to vote on:

https://indesign.uservoice.com/forums/601021-adobe-indesign-feature-requests/suggestions/38014024-on...