Multi language spell checking

I80286 · December 15, 2019, 3:31pm

Hello dynalist team.

I’m not a native English speaker, but I do a lot of stuff with it.
I also native in 2 other languages that I use on daily basis.

Currently I use English spell check but it’d be very useful if it could do few of them (ex. like slack does that, it automatically understand which language you type)

It might be a case that that people that use dynalist live in the countries where they also use native language to own stuff and English for communication with people in other countries.
For example if you are developer you might work with people around the world but writing down things in English make a lot of sense if you going to share it later. But in other hand stuff they do for themselves or for own projects, people might do in the native lang.

Having ability to have multilang support might help a lot for this cases.

Erica · December 15, 2019, 6:57pm

I believe in the desktop app you can set which language you want the spellchecker to check, given your OS supports that language.

I’m not sure how Slack does it, are they spellchecking two languages mixed in the same message? Or do they detect the language on a per message basis?

I80286 · December 17, 2019, 12:49pm

Hi @Erica They used to detect word language somehow per word (but it broken now with their last “WYSYWIG” updated.
But still chrome know how to do it properly.
Maybe you can take look on https://github.com/electron/electron/pull/20692
Looks like Electron 8 has built in spell check that should work like same as built in chrome.

Erica · December 17, 2019, 9:30pm

@Shida: could you please take a look at this?

I believe we’re currently using a spellchecker plugin for Electron.

Shida · December 17, 2019, 10:03pm

I see what you mean! I believe our current spellchecker doesn’t have the capability to support multiple languages at the same time, but the electron built in spellchecker looks very promising!

I wish they have done this earlier as it was a pain to even get the current spellchecker working, but hopefully once it’s released we can begin migrating!

I80286 · December 17, 2019, 10:25pm

@Shida It’s going for stable at 2020-02-04. I can notify you once it’s released

Shida · December 17, 2019, 10:26pm

Thank you!

Braun_Shedd · December 31, 2019, 5:07pm

An alternative to this might be to allow setting the language on a per-document basis, which would allow using the current spellchecker plugin for Electron. Perhaps the ideal location would be to add a setting in the right-click dropdown menu when selecting a document in the ‘My Files’ tab.

Currently getting around this by changing the app-level spell checker when I need to edit / proofread documents in Spanish or Mandarin, which is workable (but not ideal )

I80286 · February 11, 2020, 2:08am

@Shida Just a friendly reminder) ElectronJs 8 already in current stable

Shida · February 11, 2020, 7:00am

Yup was looking at it a few days ago. Will be seeing how we can update to it soon.

Shida · February 20, 2020, 8:07pm

Just to update on this: there seems to be some serious/breaking bugs with Electron 8.0.0 and 8.0.1 right now so we’re going to at least wait until they’re ironed out in later patches.

MonkeyMonster · March 17, 2020, 9:41am

One more vote for multi (or at least 2) language spell checking.
I’d guess that most non-English speakers (like me) write in 2 languages…

By the way, how does one “vote” up a feature request?

Philipp · March 17, 2020, 1:05pm

Normaly there are Trello cards for this on the Dynalist-Roadmap. But multi language spell checking is still missing.

Is it possible to add it @Erica ? I want to vote as well.

Erica · April 3, 2020, 3:51am

We usually add features that are (1) larger and (2) we’re unsure if we’re going to implement.

We’re going to upgrade to Electron 8.0 sooner or later, and this is a pretty small thing compared to the other things on the board.

On the forum you can do that by liking the thread.

I80286 · May 14, 2020, 9:48pm

@Shida Hey! Just a friendly reminder.

Quite long time passed after Electron 8 release. Should stable now!

Is that any chance you could check it again please?

Shida · May 14, 2020, 10:58pm

I’ve tinkered with it a little bit. It’s mostly undocumented but I managed to get something working.
Right now I have an issue filed for a broken functionality but the electron team has largely ignored it. I’m guessing it’s not a critical issue to be resolved for them so it’s not getting on the priority list.

Meanwhile I’ll try to figure out how to update the settings UI to support this change later.

Sorry again it’s taking so long!

I80286 · May 14, 2020, 11:34pm

@Shida Thanks for update!

iron77 · September 4, 2022, 5:40pm

I just tried to enable spell-checker on my Windows/Dynalist app. It successfully works in english, but I see no way in Settings to change it to any other language. I’m not talking about “multi-language at once” functionality - I’m OK even with just one language at a time. Based on discussions on these forums I was under impression that it was previously possible. Where should I be able to find this setting?