Can the spelling checker be trusted? Yes!

[Jenny Greenleaf]

I was very pleased that the Adobe engineers were interested in my problem with the spelling checker not finding obviously misspelled words. Amit Agarwal and I traded several emails and files, and he found the reason and a fix. Co-incidentally, William's suggestion landed in my email box today as well.

Apparently character tags can be set to None for language, which makes the spelling checker skip the rest of the paragraph, even if it doesn't use that tag. Here's is Amit's workaround, which worked for me.  I'm glad to know the spelling checker isn't just batty. (Except for the corrections suggestions.)

THE STEPS I DID TO CORRECT THE PROBLEM:
	• Click in the document
	• Find panel → Select find Character Format
	• Press Shift + F8 key to make it "As Is"
	• Select "Language=None"
	• In Change → Select Character Format
	• Press Shift + F8 key to make it "As Is"
	• Select "Language=US English"
	• Click "Change All"
	• Spell Check again, Spell Checker should find the misspelled word.

In my file, I had a character tag used for run-in heads that was not set to US English. I had never really noticed that you can apply language to a character tag. I know now!

Anyway, thanks to all of you, and thanks to Amit who stuck with it until he figured it out. It does seem to be a bug that the spelling checker skips the rest of the paragraph. The misspelled word definitely carried a character format that was set to US English.

Jenny


Begin forwarded message:

> From: William Abernathy <william at inch.com>
> Date: May 28, 2010 10:26:01 AM PDT
> To: jennygreenleaf at comcast.net
> Subject: Re: Can the spelling checker be trusted?
> 
> I have seen individual words and portions of paragraphs carrying foreign dictionary tags that were riding along with the text, but unresponsive to the paragraph > language setting at the paragraph level. If memory serves, I had to highlight the text without crossing a p-tag boundary and manually set the language back to None, or US English (sorry I can't be more specific -- it's been a while since I've seen this problem).
> 
> 
> Jenny Greenleaf wrote:
>> Great ideas, thank you. Sadly....
>> 
>> I did do the option to reset all paragraphs. I even made sure to tear the pod
>> away from the side so the sub-pod dialog might work.
>> 
>> The paragraph is set to US English. There are no overrides on it.
>> 
>> The word can't be in a dictionary since the spelling checker correctly finds
>> it when the cursor is placed in the same paragraph with the offending word.
>> 
>> Back to proofing....
>> 
>> Jenny
> 
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> William Abernathy
> Berkeley, CA
> http://yourwritereditor.com