Can the spelling checker be trusted?

[Scott Prentice]

Hi Jenny...

This brings up my memory of "the evil dot." Back in 1995 or 6(?) (FM 4 
or 5) I ran into a file that exhibited similar strange behavior. I could 
search (forward) for a word that I knew was in the file, and it would 
never find it. But, if I searched backwards it found the word without 
trouble. Spell checking had similar issues. I found that if the cursor 
was after a certain point in the file, the word could be found. After a 
bit of thrashing about, I discovered that the culprit was a period (the 
evil dot). If I deleted this period everything worked fine.

What was happening is that the period was like a black hole that caused 
any processing to return to the beginning of the file. I could copy this 
character into any other file and the same thing would happen .. but if 
I saved the file to MIF, there was nothing apparently special about it 
.. just a simple period.

I saved the period off in a file for later use (don't ask) .. but 
somewhere along the way it was lost (maybe it found its way to your file).

I suppose it's possible that you have a similar situation .. see if you 
also can't search for this misspelling .. and see how far away from the 
word you can move the cursor and have it still found. Try searching 
backwards. Who knows.

I've not seen this behavior again in FM, so I don't think it's a serious 
problem, but maybe it's making a resurgence. Or maybe this is a totally 
different problem.

Cheers,

...scott

Scott Prentice
Leximation, Inc.
www.leximation.com
+1.415.485.1892




Jenny Greenleaf wrote:
> FM 9, fully patched. Running in a VM under Fusion on a MacBook Pro.
>
> Yikes!
>
> I was preparing a book for PDF production when I noticed a spelling error: include was spelled "imclude".  I knew I had spell-checked the book numerous times and didn't understand why this was still there.
>
> I tried a few things:
>
> Starting from a file at the beginning of the book, did Spell Check for entire book. Did not find error.
>
> Starting from first page of the chapter that contained the error, did Spell Check for the document. Did not find the error.
>
> Positioned the cursor in the same sentence as the error and did Spell Check.  Found the error. 
>
> I have been caught off-guard a couple of times with typos in the past few months. As a result, I've been especially diligent about running the spelling checker. I am not sure what to think about this, but my confidence in the spelling checker is declining rapidly. 
>
> I am not thrilled about checking every page in a book. 
>
> Any ideas what would cause this?  The word in question is in the first line of a page and the paragraph has an anchored frame. Other than that, it's just a word in a sentence.
>
> Jenny Greenleaf
> Portland, OR
>
>
>