Problems with spell checking & language recognition

[ozean]

I used to be a pretty happy camper with Snow Leopard’s new “Automatic by Language” spell checking feature. However, for quite some time now this does not really work anymore. Even for a document that is completely in one language (German or English, usually), the spell checking feature does not correctly recognize the language and then I have to switch to the language manually.

I am baffled by this because it used to work quite well before. I have no idea when this behavior started though. It has been there for a while, several weeks at least, maybe even longer. 10.6.4 could be a possible candidate, but I haven’t really noticed such this change in the context up installing that OS update (and I usually pay more attention to minor problems after an OS update…).

Does anyone else experience this? Does anyone have an idea how I could solve this problem?

[donb]

Yes, I also have been finding this same situation. I wonder if somehow a bug made its way into Snow Leopard 10.6.4 somehow.

Don Broadribb

[raymond]

Have you tried to add the cocoAspell of Anton Leuski to your spell catcher. It adds a control panel in your system preferences where you can control it easily.

I found it to be very useful when coming to spelling of R2L languages, as well as English and French.
However, I have never succeeded to operate it with “Automatic by Language”, and when coming to multi languages documents, I have to spell check each language separately.

[ozean]

Since snow leopard supports other dictionary formats I didn’t see the need to install cocoAspell anymore. I just downloaded languages that were not included in the OS X distribution (Norwegian, for example) and imported them to the OS X spell checker.

Usually, the Automatic by Language thingy works well enough for me (though not perfect yet), so I am a happy camper with not having to switch language manually anymore. With Mellel recently becoming a strange exception that requires manual language setting…

[Cattus Thraex]

I was not happy with ‘automatic’ spelling from the very beginning, it simply led to frequent SWOD and general system slowness, so I decided to choose languages manually. In order to make life easier, I added a general system shortcut command-G, and all apps, which have ‘show spelling and grammar’ message will work, then I choose the language.
This may be due to the fact that I often use custom (= my) keyboard layouts, perhaps the system is better with the integrated keylayouts. As these keylayouts are a lot more comfortable than the Apple set, I prefer this solution, and I would suggest to try it or to find a custom solution.
I cannot confirm there is a spell-checking bug in new builds of SL, may be... Automatic spelling may be a good solution if the user may set it somehow for 2-3-4-5 languages, and associate spell checking to a certain keyboard layout. I did that for Nisus, with the help of the developers, and it works fine. Something similar should be done for Mellel as well. For example, a script allows to switch between two languages (for the time being two), set these two languages, then work with keyboard shortcuts only. Very practical and very useful when having two languages in the same document. Perhaps the script may be adapted for 3 languages in the same document; and also to be adapted for Mellel. This should be one good improvement for the next release.