Spell checking with em dashes in text ...

[Andy Kass]

Hi,

I have FM 8p277 and spell checking seems to ignore the em-dashes, but upon testing, it's weirder than that. It spell checks the whole word before the em-dash, and ignores anything after it. So I see the following (and here I use the conventional two dashes for an em-dash in plain text):

mitake--mistake => both words and the em-dash are highlighted by the spell-checker

mistake--mitake => not caught by the spell checker

In my options, the only characters I have set to ignore in words are . = and " (for code samples).

Fortunately, we don't use em-dashes in our documentation (from my experience, they're not generally used in technical writing), so it's not an issue for me, but it still looks like a bug. I agree with you (and the CMS :-) that there should be no spaces--that's how I've always seen it in print.

The space-EN-dash-space has a different usage: it's an alternative to a period for separating lead-ins from whatever follows. For example:

<bullet> Lead-in - Description.
<bullet> Lead-in - Description.

And I do like the fact that Word automatically converts space-dash-space to space-EN-dash-space. It also converts dash-dash to EM-dash automatically when it occurs between two words without any spaces. Those are very nice shortcuts I'd love to see in FM.

Thanks,

  Andy