Spell checking with em dashes in text ...

[Syed Zaeem Hosain (Syed.Hosain@aeris.net)]

Hi, all.

Something that has been bugging me for a while ... time to ask the experts here! This issue is making spell checking more tedious for some larger documents ...

In my documents, I use the Chicago Manual of Style requirement for spaces next to em dashes in body text. Specifically, to *not* to use any spaces before or after the em dash (as they say, the dash is "set closed" rather than "set open").

I.e., it says that the usage should be "<sp>wordone---wordtwo<sp>" rather than "<sp>wordone<sp>---<sp>wordtwo<sp>" (where I am using "---" to represent the em dash, "<sp>" to represent a single space character, and making up word "wordone" and "wordtwo" for this contrived example).

However, when spell-checking in FM (FrameMaker 9, on Windows Vista and Windows 7, fully patched), it finds occurrences of "wordone---wordtwo" as being spelled incorrectly. Even though "wordone" and "wordtwo" are both individually spelled correctly!

Yet, there are no such problems with "wordone<sp>---<sp>wordtwo". These are handled perfectly well!

I have not found (a) a way to prevent FM spell-checker from finding these uses, or (b) a way to make FM ignore them using the Find options.

Thus, my alternatives appear to be:

1. Insert a space before and after the em dash (Yuck! not a nice look! And the Chicago Manual of Style agrees with this !)

2. Insert a space before and after, and use an en dash instead of an em dash (make sure you note the "en"!). Btw, this is what Microsoft Word does automatically if you type "wordone"<space><dash><space>wordtwo<space>" ... it changes the <dash> to an <en dash>. This is not a bad alternative, but not as nice looking---the parenthetical aside is just not as clearly demarked!

3. Use parentheses for the asides. Not as nice looking ... although I do do this in a few places for other good reasons.

Any advice on how to handle this situation? What you all do for this?
 
Z