Setting the default spellchecking language

[Marvin]

All (or at least almost all) of our documents are in English and need to conform to Oxford (UK) English spelling.

As far as I know, we don't have any xml:lang tags in our documents.

Is there a way to set the default spellchecking language to UK English?

I found [url=http://forums.xmetal.com/index.php/topic,539]this thread[/url], but I'm not sure if it's what I need.

What I want, is basically two things:

1. If no language is selected/detected, always fall back to “UK English”.
2. If English is detected, always use the UK spelling (not US).

It would probably even be good enough to “hardwire” UK English spellchecking into the installation if that's easier.

Is there a setting we can adjust? Or would we have to use a macro?

Thank you.

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[Derek Read]

Look in the help under “Checking your spelling” then “Language settings”.
That topic shows how to set the default spell checking language. In your case you will need to select “English-UK”.

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[Marvin]

I'm sorry, my question was poorly worded.

We'd like the setting to be applied for many clients at the same time (at least when XMetaL Author is installed).
We already package macros and other customizations with the application, so it'd be great if we could just put this in some configuration file/macro/registry setting and then deploy that with the other files.

Sorry about the misunderstanding.

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[Marvin]

Is there some way to achieve this by editing a configuration file/registry setting, or by using a macro that would be run on startup?

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[Derek Read]

These settings are tracked in the registry here (for the default spell checking engine called “Writing Tools”):
HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareCorelXMetaLWritingTools10

In your case you should see a registry string (REG_SZ) called “DefaultTextDialect” set to “UK” and a key named “UK” with various settings inside it.

Make the changes you need to make in the UI on a test machine then observe what is changed there. That is what you will need to set on other user's machines.

---

Why Corel? The default spelling engine was created by a company purchased by Corel, and Corel was the owner of XMetaL during the time this particular engine was integrated with XMetaL (around 2001/2002). When Corel sold the XMetaL product line we retained the rights to continue using this “Writing Tools” engine.

A few years ago we implemented support for “Hunspell” a popular 3rd party spell checking engine but as many  “dictionaries” for that engine have specific license terms we do not bundle them. This might be of interest to you if you need detailed control over the content in the dictionary files. See: http://forums.xmetal.com/index.php/topic,3011.0.html

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[Marvin]

Thank you so much!

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[Marvin]

Just one more question:
We'd like to maintain a wordlist for our organization.
What's the recommended way to create such a wordlist and install it on all machines? We use a centralized deployment mechanism, so it's no problem to automatically roll this out to all clients.
Thank you.

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[Derek Read]

The “user word list” used by Writing Tools is stored here:

%appdata%DocumentsCorel User FilesXMetaL

That's the default location. You can put the files anywhere on your machine and then tell Writing Tools where a particular file is by adding it to Writing Tools for a particular language using Options > User Word Lists.

That setting is stored in the registry as well.

You can point to up to 10 different files for each language. At least I think it's 10. I can't see any reason or need to go beyond 1 or 2. However, what that means is that you could have a file that all users use, different files for different groups, or a combination of multiple files where some group only needs one and another group might use that one plus additional files. I think in the vast majority of cases a single file is enough for all. However, what this does allow is to have a file you install that does not get updated by the user, and leave their own UWL set as the default so they can add their own words to it (when a user adds words to the spell checker they go into the “default” UWL file).

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[Marvin]

I guess we can also just ship a modified system word list (under C:Program Files (x86)CorelSharedXMetaLWriting Tools10.0)?
But what's the best way to modify that file?
Shall we just update the user word list on one machine and then ship that as WT10EN.UWL (or WT10UK.UWL?)?
Thank you.

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[Derek Read]

We don't support making modifications to the main word list files and are unable to provide any software for working with them.

So yes, adding words to a UWL and then delivering that is the best option.

…unless you wish to look into using the Hunspell dictionaries. The only true benefit to using Hunspell would be to allow you to limit the words in the main file to words you approve (ie: with the right 3rd party tools, you could create your own files from scratch or remove words from an existing file set). See: http://forums.xmetal.com/index.php/topic,3011.0.html

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[Marvin]

Thank you very much. I really appreciate the great support you give us.

What is the DefaultUIDialect registry setting for? It doesn't seem to get updated from “EN” to “UK”.
Would it make sense to set this to “UK” as well?

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[Derek Read]

My recommendation would be to only make changes using the spell checker's options dialogs then copy those changes to other machines once things are configured as you want them to be.

If you make a change in the dialogs and something is not changed in the registry then leave it as is.

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[Marvin]

Makes sense. Thank you!

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