Checking Spelling


Search and replace can help fix mistakes in your text, but it's usually not enough. Another helpful tool is a spell checker, which reads through your text to look for misspelled words. Although you'll still want to proofread your documents, using the spell checker both in your word processor and in InDesign helps reduce the chances of errors in your final document.

InDesign's Check Spelling feature flags three types of possible editorial problems: repeated words such as an an, words with odd capitalization such as the internal capitalization (called intercaps ) in software and company names (like InDesign ), and words not found in the spelling dictionary that may be spelled wrong. You can customize the spelling dictionary, and you can purchase other companies' spelling dictionaries to add words from disciplines like law and medicine, as well as for other languages.

Specifying the text to check

InDesign lets you control which text is spell-checked so you can concentrate on a new story or paragraph added to a document, check all the text in a document toward the end of the publishing process, or check multiple documents at the same time on similar subject matter.

As with Find/Change, specifying the text to check is a two-step process: First set up the spell-check scope in the document, then specify the scope in the Search menu.

To set up the scope, highlight text, click in a story to check from the cursor forward, select a frame containing a story, or open multiple documents. Just as in search and replace, what you choose to open and select will determine what scope options InDesign has for spell-checking.

Then, open the Check Spelling dialog box (Edit Check Spelling, or z +I or Ctrl+I) and choose an option from the Search pop-up menu: Document, All Documents, Story, To End of Story, and Selection. Figure 15-9 shows the dialog box. Depending on how you set up the scope, not all the options are available in the Search pop-up menu. For example, if you did not highlight text, the Selection option is not available. However, you can change the scope setup in the document while the Check Spelling dialog box is open ‚ for example, you can open additional documents to check.


Figure 15-9: Use the Search pop-up menu in the Check Spelling dialog box to specify which text to spell-check.
Tip ‚  

To check the spelling of a single word, double-click to highlight it and then open the spell checker ‚ the Check Spelling dialog box's Search pop-up menu is automatically set to Selection.

Tip ‚  

Control+click or right-click on a word or a point in a text frame (using the Type tool) to get the contextual menu from which you choose Check Spelling.

Using the Check Spelling dialog box

When you first open the Check Spelling dialog box, it displays "Ready to Spell Check" at the top. To begin checking the text scope you specified in the Search pop-up menu, click Start. When the spell checker encounters a word without a match in the dictionary or a possible capitalization problem, the dialog box displays "Not in Dictionary" at the top and shows the word. When the spell checker encounters repetition such as me me, the dialog box displays "Duplicate Word" and shows the repeated words. (Refer to Figure 15-9 for an illustration of the dialog box.) Use the buttons along the right side of the dialog box to handle flagged words as follows :

  • To leave the current instance of a Not in Dictionary word or Duplicate Word unchanged, click Ignore. To leave all instances of the same problem unchanged, click Ignore All.

  • To change the spelling of a Not in Dictionary word, click a word in the Suggested Corrections list or edit the spelling or capitalization in the Change To field. To make the change, click Change.

  • To correct an instance of a Duplicate Word, edit the text in the Change To field, then click Change.

  • To change all occurrences of a Not in Dictionary word or a Duplicate Word to the information in the Change To field, click Change All.

  • To add a word flagged as incorrect ‚ but that you know is correct ‚ to InDesign's spelling dictionary, click Add.

  • To close the Check Spelling dialog box after checking all the specified text, click Done.

While you're using Check Spelling, you can jump between the dialog box and the document at any time. This lets you edit a possibly misspelled word in context or to edit surrounding text as a result of changed spelling. So if you find an instance of a a in front of apple, you can change the entire phrase to an apple rather than just replace the duplicate a a with a in the dialog box and have to remember to later fix a apple to an apple.

Working with multiple languages

Each word in InDesign can have a distinct language assigned to it (English, French, Spanish, German, and so on). The word's language attribute tells InDesign which dictionary to consult when spell-checking or hyphenating the word. For example, if you have the word fran ƒ §ais in an English sentence , you can change the language of that word so it is no longer flagged by the English spell checker ‚ the French spell checker would be used on it and recognize that the word is correctly spelled.

Note ‚  

Just because you have the ability to control language at the word level doesn't necessarily mean that you have to use it. In general, even when publishing to an international audience, full paragraphs or stories will be in the same language. For example, if you have the same packaging for a product sold in the United States and France, you might have one descriptive paragraph in English and the other in French. The English dictionary also contains many common words with foreign origins such as jalape ƒ ±o, m ƒ lange, and cr ƒ pe.

To assign a language to text, highlight the text and choose an option from the Language pop-up menu on the Character pane, as shown in Figure 15-10. You can also set the language as part of a character or paragraph style (see Chapters 17 and 18 for more details). In the Check Spelling dialog box, a field above the Search menu shows the language of each word as it's checked. Unfortunately, you can't change the language in that dialog box.


Figure 15-10: The Language menu on the Character palette lets you choose a different language for hyphenating and spell-checking highlighted text.
Note ‚  

There's a language option called [No Language]; selecting it prevents spell-checking and hyphenation.




Adobe InDesign CS Bible
Adobe InDesign CS3 Bible
ISBN: 0470119381
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 344
Authors: Galen Gruman

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