Spellcheck no longer works

[lomkiri]

Originally Posted by Deina97

YES!!!
That was the problem! It had:

<dc:language>ca</dc:language>

You could easily have saved time and energy testing at least with one other book.
Third msg in the thread:

Originally Posted by lomkiri

(Another guess) :
For all books ? (I mean : Did you try with another book ?)
If not, maybe the language of the culprit is not defined correctly (in the opf or in the header of the html pages).

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by KevinH

In addition, see the setting for dc:language in the opf metadata of the epub.

I didn't realise dc:language played a role in spell checking

Would I be right in assuming its last in chain - i.e. if there's no lang tags in the content, use the metadata value?

BR

[BetterRed]

The attached screenshot shows the English variants recognised by calibre's default English dictionary, and the dictionary I use. Seems odd to me that two of the five members of the so-called Anglosphere are excluded from the default English dictionary - plus the former Dominion of South Africa

BR

[lomkiri]

Originally Posted by BetterRed

I didn't realise dc:language played a role in spell checking

Would I be right in assuming its last in chain - i.e. if there's no lang tags in the content, use the metadata value?BR

From another thread:

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

IIRC the hierarchy goes like this:

1) lang on individual tag or its parents going all the way upto html tag
2) if (1) is not found fallback to language in opf file
3) if (2) isnot found fallback to the users interface language

I am guessing in this case, the users interface language is one for which there is no builtin dictionary.

[theducks]

Originally Posted by Deina97

When I added lang="EN-us" xml:lang="EN-us" to the second line of an EPUB file that spellcheck didn't work in before, it started working on that file.

But I checked one of the files where Spellcheck does work, and it had no lang= statement. ༼ つ ◕_◕ ༽つ

Your (letter) case above is backwards
en-US, en-GB

[Tex2002ans]

Originally Posted by Deina97

YES!!!

That was the problem! It had:

<dc:language>ca</dc:language>

When I changed it to:

<dc:language>en</dc:language>

it worked!

"ca" means it your book was accidentally marked as "Catalan" instead of English.

If you opened:

• Tools > Check Spelling

In the language column, you would've also seen Catalan for many words:



That's when you know something is fishy with your:

• language in the HTML
  
  • lang / xml:lang towards the top of your HTML files.
• book's language in the metadata
  
  • <dc:language> in the content.opf file.

For example, I ran across one book years ago where it was accidentally marked "fr" (French) instead of "en" (English).

- - -

Side Note: Another symptom of something wrong with an ebook's language is if you see:

• red squigglies everywhere.

+ you would've been surprised when turning on Text-to-Speech... it would've been speaking "English" out in a completely different language!

- - -

Originally Posted by BetterRed

I didn't realise dc:language played a role in spell checking

BetterRed, buddy ol' pal, you're killing me!!!

HTML lang is used for so much stuff now! See my famous post in the "<i>, <em> or <span> for italics ?" thread explaining all the use-cases.

Multi-Language spellchecking + ebooks have been getting better and better since my big nudges in 2016.

(Thanks, Kovid, for implementing it in Calibre's Spellcheck Lists all those years ago! )

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by BetterRed

The attached screenshot shows the English variants recognised by calibre's default English dictionary, and the dictionary I use. Seems odd to me that two of the five members of the so-called Anglosphere are excluded from the default English dictionary - plus the former Dominion of South Africa

BR

FWIW: calibre's User interface language list does include Australian and Canadian English, but New Zealand English is excluded

BR

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by BetterRed

The attached screenshot shows the English variants recognised by calibre's default English dictionary, and the dictionary I use. Seems odd to me that two of the five members of the so-called Anglosphere are excluded from the default English dictionary - plus the former Dominion of South Africa

BR

Even funnier is that it shows that you are using an Australian English variant for Australia, Canada and Republic of South Africa. I would have expected en-au, en-ca and en-za dictionaries or a multi-variant dictionary.,

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by DNSB

Even funnier is that it shows that you are using an Australian English variant for Australia, Canada and Republic of South Africa. I would have expected en-au, en-ca and en-za dictionaries or a multi-variant dictionary.,

That's because en-AU, en-CA and en-ZA are absent in the default en-GB and en-US dictionary locale files, but present in the Apache Office sourced dictionary locale files - and there are dic and aff files for each.

But why isn't en-CA in the en-US default dictionary locale file, yet en-PH is in it; and why aren't en-AU and en-ZA in the en-GB default dictionary locale file, yet en-BZ, en-NZ, etc are in it. And if Ghana, why not Nigeria and Kenya?

BR

[Tex2002ans]

Originally Posted by BetterRed

That's because en-AU, en-CA and en-ZA are absent in the default en-GB and en-US dictionary locale files, but present in the Apache Office sourced dictionary locale files - and there are dic and aff files for each.

But why isn't en-CA in the en-US default dictionary locale file, yet en-PH is in it; and why aren't en-AU and en-ZA in the en-GB default dictionary locale file, yet en-BZ, en-NZ, etc are in it. And if Ghana, why not Nigeria and Kenya?

I've written quite a few in-depth posts in the LibreOffice subreddit about English dictionary files. (Here's the one from yesterday):

• /r/LibreOffice: "Adding Wiktionary as Source for Spell Check"

Different variants are taken care of by different people.

• US / AU / CA = Kevin Atkinson
  
  • SCOWL (+ Github)
• GB = Marco Pinto
  
  • Proofing Tool GUI (+ Github)
• ZA = Dwayne Bailey

So... why is there no BZ + other variants?

Probably because nobody has decided to create/maintain them... so until someone steps up and does quality work, it won't exist in other programs.

- - -

Side Note: If you want more info on generating such dictionary, see the talk from:

• LibreOffice Conference 2021: "Enhancing a spellcheck dictionary by Wikidata lexemes" by Stanislav Horáček

where he described creating a new Czech dictionary.

[kovidgoyal]

Originally Posted by Tex2002ans

(Thanks, Kovid, for implementing it in Calibre's Spellcheck Lists all those years ago! )

You are welcome, I am multi-lingual myself so I try to support multiple languages wherever feasible.

[Deina97]

Originally Posted by lomkiri

You could easily have saved time and energy testing at least with one other book.
Third msg in the thread:

I tried it on multiple books, as I stated in an earlier message. I think I had 4 or 5 in a row that wouldn't come up.

But thank you!