I wrote my murder mystery manuscript in Word. Word had a Canadian Dictionary so I thought great, I will use this instead of UK or American.
Well, that was all fine and dandy but when I went to upload the chapters to Affinity Publisher for formatting, there was no Canadian dictionary! Since all my Word were formatted with the Canadian dictionary, it kept coming up with errors for dictionary in the pre-flight testing and even when I changed it to UK, nope, didn’t matter! Since every single word is under Canadian, there was a constant discrepancy between dictionaries including with find and replace! Total nightmare! I went on line looking to add a Canadian dictionary and that proved more than a challenge than I was up to so I decided to go back to my children’s books and ignore it. I went on forums for suggestions and everything I could find. As one person put it, doesn’t Canada have enough of a population to warrant it’s own dictionary?!? What many folks don’t realize is that Canadian Grammar is like the best of both worlds; some of it like in the UK and some of it is American and ALMOST nothing is French. I remember I bought a new laptop. At the time I didn’t know much about computers and it came with discs to set up the operating system. It asked what language and made it clear, once there, it wasn’t going any where! Well, I thought, ok, it says Canadian English so I might as well use that. Well, I hadn’t noticed the keyboard had French accent marks until I set up the keyboard. Next thing everything was all over the place to accommodate French! Last time I checked the predominant language in Canada was English! Being some one who was taught old-school, how to type, the set up of the keyboard is very important! I ended up getting so frustrated, I gave it to my 12-year-old son! It was supposed to be for school, however it ended up being for games but whatever! From that point on I have been very sensitive about language and English. As a TESOL teacher, I can say not all English is the same and I simply expected a good program such as Affinity Publisher wouldn’t be so ignorant as to not have English Grammar and spelling. Go figure since it has dictionaries for some very obscure languages! I am surprised it doesn't have Latin! So, there is a forum on how to add a dictionary however as the person said, it took over two hours to figure it all out. Sorry, for me it is all blah, blah, blah and I don't have the mental fortitude for it! it really doesn’t help my problem so I figure the only thing I can do is take my book, chapter by chapter and do a spell check under UK dictionary (which is NOT really Canadian Grammar by the way!) and save each chapter again. THEN when I put it in Affinity Publisher, I will have more ability to change words, and find words I want to edit and so on although most of it is going to be done now elsewhere! I have lost count of how many times I have edited that book!!!!
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June 2024
AuthorArtist, Buddhist, Educator, Traveller, Cabinet Maker, kayaker, etc and now writer! |