August 2006

Spell check dictionaries
Mac Tip #258/30-August-2006

In recent Tips I showed how to set your preferred languages for both your computer and your software. My settings put Australian English as my first preference, so if I check spelling in a Cocoa application such as TextEdit, the Australian English dictionary is the default.

Note: ‘Cocoa’ and ‘Carbon’ refer different techniques for making software. Some applications are ‘Carbon’, some are ‘Cocoa’ and others use other techniques. This is a bit like cooking fish: fried, grilled and baked are all different techniques.

‘Cocoa’ applications all share the same dictionary; other applications may not offer a spell check or may use their own dictionary.

Let’s say I open TextEdit, which comes installed on all new Macs. I type some text, in my case including some Māori words, one with a macron (the line above some vowels), some mis-spelled words, and the word ‘jandals’, which we often use in New Zealand but which apparently is not common elsewhere, even in Australia.

Screenshot 1 shows my text, with many words underlined in red to show that they aren’t recognised by the spellcheck dictionary. Notice how the a with the macron above it in the word Māori has confused the spellcheck.

I Control Click on the document to call up a contextual menu and choose Spelling….

Once the spellcheck window appears I can choose the dictionary I wish to use. Australian English was already selected because that is the setting I’ve chosen for my computer, but if I wanted to choose another language then I could do that here.

Screenshot 2 shows some suggestions from the Australian dictionary for the mis-spelled word funeral. I can select a suggestion and click the Correct button to replace the wrongly spelled word with the correct one.

Screenshot 3: The Māori placename Turangawaewae is correctly spelt but the dictionary doesn’t recognise it. I click the Learn button to add the word to the dictionary.

Note: jandals are a type of footwear characterised by a flat sole held on to the foot with a y-shaped thong. In other countries they may be called thongs or flip-flops.

Next week: Other spellcheck techniques.

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Software in your Language
Mac Tip #257/23-August-2006

The whole matter of languages and your Mac involves several layers. As we work our way towards making the most of spellchecks it’s useful to see how we can work with languages.

In the last Tip I showed how to set your preferred languages. In the first screenshot you can see that I’ve set my computer to prefer this sequence for menus and dialog boxes:

• Australian English
• British English
• English
• Maori
• Deutsch (German)

Some of the software on your computer supports more than one language. To see and control which languages are used select the application icon in the Finder and choose Get Info from the File menu. If necessary, click the disclosure triangle for the Languages section of the Get Info window.

All the languages supported by the application are listed in the Languages section, with a checkbox beside every Language that is active. In my screenshot you can see that I’ve temporarily deactivated English for Safari.

Now when I start up Safari it compares my list of preferences in the International System Preferences Pane to its own list of available languages. Because I unchecked English as a possibility for Safari, the first successful match that it finds is German, as you can see in my third screenshot, which shows Safari’s menus in German.

Not all software has the necessary language resources, but you can easily check which ones support the languages you’re interested in by Getting Info as described above.

As always, click on the thumbnails for larger versions.

Next week: Getting to Spelling.

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While writing the previous Tip I set my computer’s language to Māori. It didn’t seem to make any difference, but then I noticed some very strange and problematic behaviours around window size. These seemed to be fixed by setting the language to Australian English.

I’m still troubleshooting.

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