Writing in a Language Other Than English in Deckle

Deckle is a writing app for novelists and non-fiction authors, and it doesn't assume you write in English. Set your language once in Settings → Editor → Spelling, and spellcheck switches to it immediately in every document you have open. Fifteen dictionaries are available, including German, French, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese, Swedish, Turkish, and Norwegian.

What You'll Need

• Deckle installed, with Enable spellcheck turned on.
• A project open (the language setting applies to all of them, so it doesn't matter which).

Step-by-Step

1. Open Settings → Editor and scroll to the Spelling section. It's the same place you turn spellcheck on and off.
2. Pick your language from the Dictionary dropdown. The full list: English (US, UK, Canada, Australia), Español (España), Español (México), Deutsch (Deutschland), Deutsch (Schweiz), Français, Italiano, Nederlands, Português (Portugal), Svenska, Türkçe, and Norsk (Bokmål).
3. Pick the right regional variant, not just the right language. This is the part people skip. Swiss Standard German writes ss where Germany's spelling uses ß, so choosing Deutsch (Deutschland) for Swiss prose flags perfectly correct words. Mexican and Peninsular Spanish differ in vocabulary the same way US and UK English do.
4. Start typing and check the underlines appear. Type a word you know is wrong. If nothing gets underlined at all, look back at the Spelling section: if a dictionary failed to load, a warning appears there saying spellcheck isn't running for that language, rather than leaving you to assume your spelling is flawless.
5. Set your book's Language for export separately. Spellcheck is an app setting for you; the language tag inside your exported book is a per-project one. Open Compile → Metadata → Book Details and set Language to your language code (de, it, nl, sv, and so on). It defaults to en, and it's what tells an e-reader which hyphenation rules to use, so it's worth correcting before you export an EPUB.
6. Deal with the second language, if you're mixing. Deckle checks against one dictionary at a time, so quoted dialogue or terminology in another language will be underlined. Right-click and choose Add "[word]" to Dictionary for anything recurring, or Ignore for one-offs. Your personal dictionary is checked alongside whichever language is active, so words you add stay recognized after you switch languages back and forth.

Common Mistakes

• Expecting a per-document or per-project language. There's one spellcheck language for the whole app, shared across every project. If you're drafting a German novel and an English blog post in parallel, you switch the setting between sessions rather than setting it per file.
• Assuming German compounds will be flagged. They used to be. Everyday compound nouns like Krankenhäuser, Autobahnen, and Bundesregierung were wrongly underlined, and that's fixed in both German dictionaries. If you avoided German spellcheck because of this, it's worth turning back on.
• Waiting on Turkish and thinking it's broken. Turkish takes noticeably longer than the other dictionaries to load the first time you select it, because of how much word-formation it has to process. Give it a moment before concluding something's wrong.
• Looking for Brazilian Portuguese or Nynorsk. Only Português (Portugal) and Norsk (Bokmål) are bundled. There's no way to add your own dictionary file.
• Trying to write in a right-to-left language. Deckle has no right-to-left text support in the editor or in its export formats, so Arabic, Hebrew, and Persian aren't offered as spellcheck languages and their text wouldn't lay out correctly anyway.
• Leaving spellcheck on for an unsupported language. If your language isn't in the list, turn Enable spellcheck off. Every word being underlined is worse than no underlines at all.