How do I unlearn words from the spelling dictionary?

Let's say that you write a text about someone with the incredibly attractive name "Magnus". The name is underlined in Pages as incorrectly spelt, if you type in English. To add the name to your spelling dictionary, you may simply right-click (ctrl-click) on it and select "Learn Spelling" from the menu, and Pages will from now on accept the spelling.

Now, assume that by mistake the word you right-clicked was "Nagnus". To tell Pages that you made a mistake that should be forgotten, you right-click the word and this time select "Unlearn Spelling" from the menu.



This technique applies to TextEdit as well.

In older versions of Apple's software, you could unlearn words from the Spelling dialogue box, but with current versions, the way to go is right-clicking.

Spelling does not work. What can I do?

There are a couple of things to try:

• Highlight all text and verify in the Inspector > Text > More, that a language is chosen.
  
• "Clean up" the document by exporting it to some other format (MS Word or old Pages formats for example), and import it again.
• Go to Applications > Utilities and run Disk Utility. Go to First Aid > Repair Disk Permissions. (It actually has worked for people with this problem.)
• You may have an old version of CocoAspell. Update to a newer version, and the problem may go away. (If you do not even have it installed, do not bother upgrading, of course.)
• Check username/Library/Services. If you see a file called "Spell Catcher Services.service", delete it, log out, and log back in.
• Check username/Library/Services. If you see a file called "aspell.service", delete it, log out, and log back in.
• Remove files from username/Library/Spelling
• Check Username/Library/Application Support. If you have a folder there called "Spell Catcher", remove it.
• Go to /Library/Caches and trash all files ending with .csstore, and then reboot.

How do I spell and grammar check in another language?

If it is just a matter of spell checking in one document, you can change the dictionary in the Inspector > T > Other > Language. The language will be set for all currently highlighted text. Warning: when you change style, the language may also change.

If you want all new documents to use spell checking of another language, you have to go through the following steps, for each template you intend to use.

1. Open a new document with the template you want to use.
2. Open the Styles Drawer (View > Show Styles Drawer).
3. Select the first style in the list. (This is often "Free Form".)
4. Change the language in the inspector as described above.
5. Click on the red triangle to the right of the style name in the Style Drawer, and in the menu that pops up, choose "Redefine Style from Selection".
6. Repeat steps 3-5 for every Paragraph Style in the Style Drawer.
7. Go to File > Save as Template, and choose a good name of the template.
8. If you have only one template you always want to use, you can choose it in Pages > Preferences > General > For New Documents, where you select "Use template:..." and then click on Choose... and choose the template.

And now for some additional hints:

Note that you can have several styles in the same document for different languages. You can for example have one style called "French body" and another called "Italian body". You can even associate shortcuts to the styles, in the Styles drawer, so you quickly can change between one language and another.

Another way to change language spelling is to quit Pages, go to System Preferences > International > Language, and drag your favourite language to the top. Then restart Pages. The inconvenience here is that all menus change as well, even in other applications as they start.

If you want spell check in a language that is not supported by Apple, you can try the free CocoAspell by Anton Leuski. CocoAspell claims support for languages like Afrikaans, Amharic, Arabic, Azerbaijani, Belarusian, Bulgarian, Bengali, Breton, Catalan, Czech, Kashubian, Welsh, Greek, Esperanto, Estonian, Persian, Finnish, Faroese, Frisian, Irish, Scottish Gaelic, Galician, Gujarati, Manx Gaelic, Hebrew, Hindi, Hiligaynon, Croatian, Upper Sorbian, Hungarian, Armenian, Interlingua, Indonesian, Icelandic, Kurdi, Latin, Lithuanian, Latvian, Low Saxon, Malagasy, Maori, Macedonian, Malayalam, Mongolian, Marathi, Malay, Maltese, Norwegian Bokmål, Norwegian Nynorsk, Chichewa, Oriya, Punjabi, Polish, Quechua, Romanian, Kinyarwanda, Sardinian, Slovak, Slovenian, Serbian, Swahili, Tamil, Telugu, Tetum, Turkmen, Tagalog, Setswana, Turkish, Ukrainian, Uzbek, Vietnamese, Walloon, Yiddish, Zulu. Pages does not support all those languages, but CocoAspell works with other applications as well.

How do I get spell checking in my favourite language, which does not appear in the Inspector?

Check out Cocoaspell, which has dictionaries for more than 70 different languages.

How do I get spell checking in British English?

1. Go to System Preferences > International > Languages.
2. Click on the Edit List... button and add British English. Make sure it appears on the top of the list of languages.
3. In Pages, go to the Inspector > Text > More, and make sure that British English is chosen.