Adobe, mate, please add an Australian Dictionary to InDesign

In April 2017, Keith Gilbert wrote an article on InDesignsecrets highlighting the importance of understanding what dictionary Adobe InDesign was using when performing a spell check on documents.

This is particularly true for English speakers who live outside of the USA, UK or Canada who may not realise that there is no InDesign-installed dictionary specifically for their location.

There is no Australian Dictionary in InDesign by default

There are myriad countries that use English as its first official- or de facto language, and many are satisfied to use the English (UK) definition for their spelling. Australia and New Zealand are exceptions to this rule, but as I live in Australia, I will present the Australian arguments for using an Australian Dictionary:

With the exception of words unique to the Australian lexicon, there are other day-to-day differences between Australian English and other dictionaries, such as:

• words that end in -ize in US usually end in -ise, such as criticise, realise…
• words that end in -or in US usually end in -our, such as honour, colour, flavour, neighbour…
• SOME words that end in -er in US usually end in -re, such as centre, metre. This is particularly a problem with metric measurements when represented in US English
• SOME words that end in -og in US can end in -ogue, such as catalogue, epilogue… but obviously not all words such as smog, dog, jog…
• spelling of words such as Mom/Mum, Tire/Tyre, sulfur/sulphur, aluminium/aluminum

Recognising this as an issue, both Microsoft Word and OpenOffice do provide for an Australian English dictionary. But this leads to the next problem:

InDesign can give a false impression that there is an Australian Dictionary

Take the following sentence that I have in Microsoft Word:

The ionised particles in the centre turn a red colour once the reaction is realised.

If I save this Microsoft Word file and place it into InDesign, InDesign applies the default spell-check to the text and highlights the problem words.

But if I cut and paste that sentence from Microsoft Word directly into Adobe InDesign using the clipboard defaults in the preferences and dynamic spelling turned on, here is what happens:

Note in the Character palette that the Language dropdown says English: Australian, so what’s the fuss? The problem is that InDesign is giving us a false impression. To the same paragraph, let’s type some words directly at the end of that pasted sentence – words that an Australian spell-checker would normally flag such as honor or center.

Still nothing, but the dynamic spelling should report these two words as being incorrectly spelled. What if I type some rubbish that any spell-checker should see?

Still nothing again (trust me, fxxxazzeyz isn’t an Australian word!) so any text that contains the character trait that was pasted from the original Microsoft Word sentence will be skipped from InDesign’s spell check, and it will use the default dictionary of English USA to check the rest of the text that doesn’t contain this character trait.

A similar technique of assigning text the [No Language] character trait is used to bypass spell-check and described in this indesignsecrets video:

This presents a real problem, given that none of the text with the Australian dictionary character trait are truly being checked for their spelling.

Installing an Australian Dictionary is overly-complicated

Sandee Cohen wrote up an article on InDesignsecrets detailing how to install a hunspell dictionary and there is another set of instructions on the Adobe InDesign help page on how to do this, but quite frankly both processes are more complicated than most users are prepared to tolerate.

Vote to change this!

There is a suggestion on the InDesign Uservoice page to add an Australian Dictionary to the interface. If you would like to see this added to future versions of InDesign, please vote here!