I routinely write messages in three languages: Dutch, German and British English. Most of the time, everything that I write is flagged as wrong by the spell-checker. How can I get the language of the message to be properly recognised, as in Outlook?
My system and installation language is Dutch. When I write a message in German or English, it still spell-checks everything as Dutch, so the page looks very red from all the underlining.
When I choose the proper language setting in Windows (de-DE or en-GB), the language is still not recognised for spell-checking purposes. The keyboard is always US English International, for all three languages. Obviously, it would not make sense to change hardware umpteen times a day, each time when writing in a different language. (And I doubt that I can get German or UK keyboards, here.)
Install the dictionaries for the languages you use. Menu > Tools > Settings > General > Spell-Checker > Download dictionaries.
Then when composing an email you can select the language under Menu > Tools > Spell-Check Language.
Unfortunately, I don’t think you can have more than one selected at a time, nor does it automatically detect the language you are typing.
One thing you can try is to add the other two dictionaries to your custom dictionary, which is found in C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\eM Client. The file is named nl-NL.custdic or similar. Open this file with a text editor. If you have installed the other dictionaries through settings, you will find them in C:\Program Files (x86)\eM Client\Dictionaries. They are en-GB.dic and de-DE.dic. Open them with your text editor and copy the contents over to the custom dictionary file. Once you have restarted eM Client, all three will be considered for spell checking.
Thank you for your response. And I actually had those language already installed. What I did not realise is that one must actively change the language for spell-checking, each time when writing a message. That is rather cumbersome.
And to be honest, although it would work up to a point, dumping all languages into a single custom dictionary is not very elegant, to say the least. Besides, if there are sentences in different languages in a single message (which happens frequently with me, as a translator), the spell-checking would almost certainly not be very reliable for words that have the same meaning, but are spelt ever so slightly differently in the various languages.
I hope the developers see this and will work on automatic language recognition on a sentence-by-sentence basis (or, at least, paragraph-by-paragraph basis).
It is more than overdue that emClient at least allows to quickly change the spellchecker language (not with the keyboards – most people keep the native keyboard layout, even when writing in other languages!)
Better – and not really hard to implement – would be to automatically detect the used language.
It shows that the programmers from emClient do not use other languages. If they would need to switch the spellchecker language for every second e-mail (like I and others have to), this feature would be implemented the day before yesterday!
Dear Gary! Could you please advise how to delete unwanted dictionaries? I’ve installed eM Client 8 and it came with huge number or spell-check languages that I do not need. Or do I have to delete them by hand?
Well just for sake of not having to scroll through all of them when I need to use max 3 dictionaries. Version 7 had this empty and it was by my choice to install dictionaries. 8 comes with 34 dictionaries already installed … I don’t want them:)
On Windows, eM Client uses it’s own dictionaries because it has its own built-in spell checker.
Mac is a bit different. Dictionaries downloaded in eM Client will be in ~/Library/Dictionaries, but the Mac version of eM Client will also use the OS spell checker languages. That is probably what you are seeing a long list of, as there are options listed there for which we don’t provide dictionaries. You will need to remove the languages from your OS.
