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• • March 31, 2016 at 3:46 am #83524
    Patrick Neylan

    Member

    Can you get spell check to recognise two words when they’re joined by a hyphen? Of course it recognises “nine” and “inch”, but doesn’t recognise “nine-inch” (as in nails).

    We write about shipping, so we link a lot of port and country pairs, such as “Hamburg-Baltimore”, “Seattle-Singapore”, “China-Mexico”, etc. I can’t put every one in the dictionary, and it slows spellchecking down so much that I can barely use it. Unfortunately I need to use it because dynamic spellchecking doesn’t recognise words in the custom dictionary until you run a spellcheck.

    Most spellcheckers know not to highlight these. Can InDesign’s spellchecker be made to do the same?

  • March 31, 2016 at 5:59 am #83530
    David Blatner

    Keymaster

    I just copied your message into InDesign and spell-checked it and all those hyphenated words were spelled correctly for me. I wonder why they’re showing up as incorrect for you? Maybe the Language applied to the text in the Character panel?

  • April 8, 2016 at 6:10 am #83781
    Patrick Neylan

    Member

    I’ve no idea why. The text is marked as English language, but the spellchecker doesn’t recognise any hyphenated words unless that specific pairing is also in the dictionary. So it recognises ‘nine’ and ‘inch’, but underlines ‘nine-inch’ as an unrecognised word.

    It’s a real problem for me. There’s the added problem that dynamic spell-checking underlines words in the custom dictionary, so you can’t spot errors without running the spellchecker, in which case you spend ages telling it to ignore uncapitalised words in tables and email addresses, abbreviations in tables, etc. The result is that, if I’m pushed for time, I have to ignore the spellchecker and proofread my document the old-fashioned way, checking every spelling with the naked eye.

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