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Spell Check – Can I tell InDesign that 2 separate words are actually 1 word?

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    • #62088
      jimmykup
      Member

      Hello everyone,

      I'm creating a catalog in InDesign that uses product names. These product names often have multiple words that aren't actually words. I'm getting tired of having to “Ignore All” everytime I do a spellcheck on the document. “UE Series” is an example of a product name I'm dealing with. I don't want to have to add “UE” as a valid word in my dictionary.

      Is there any way that I can tell InDesign that “UE Series” is one whole valid word?

    • #62090
      Anonymous
      Inactive

      Words set to “No Language” do not get checked by the spell checker.

      You can do a search for “UE Series” and then apply the “No Language” in the Advanced Character formats.

      Something like GREP FIND of

      UE(?= Series)

      That would find all instances of UE followed by “Series” – but it won't include Series in the search, so SERIES would still be spell checked when you are performing that task, but it should skip UE becuase it is set to “No Language”

      But that means having to do it for all instances if you type it in.

      You can set up a GREP STYLE within your Paragraph Style for this.

      Create a Character Style for “No Language”

      Then in the Paragraph Style go to GREP STYLE and input

      Character Style= No Language

      UE(?= Series)

      But you'd need to set this up for every word that you come across in the Spell Check that you don't want it to find.

      I'm not sure if it's possible to “Script” this – where it can pluck out the Ignored Words from the user dictionary and then apply the No Language to these and remove them from the Ignored Words list (so you don't inadvertently type UE instead of say “un”)

      But setting the text to No Language for certain words would definitely exclude it from the Spell Check.

    • #62096

      I'm not sure if it's possible to “Script” this – where it can pluck out the Ignored Words from the user dictionary …

      How very odd. For User dictionaries you can call up lists of Added words and of Removed words, but not Ignored words!

      This small script, for example, shows the list of added words per language:

      x = [];
      for (i=0; i<app.userDictionaries.length; i++)
      x.push (app.userDictionaries[i].name+”: “+app.userDictionaries[i].addedWords.join(“; “));
      alert (x.join('r'));

      But there is No Such Option for the ignored words!

    • #62100
      Anonymous
      Inactive

      That is strange. It would have been cool!

      I was thinking an external file of Ignored words could be built and then you could run a script to apply No Language to these words in any document.

      Certainly, in books I do on taxation, there are many “made up” words that exist only in the world of tax advisers and accountants.

      For example, I would like to apply “No Language” to the word “InDesign” within the document, but I would like to know if the word “indesign” was in the document. I don't think Ignored words are case sensitive?

    • #62108
      Alan Gilbertson
      Participant

      The problem is that “ignored” is a temporary status. If you close the document and reopen, you'll have to ignore them all over again. Building a set of grep styles all pointing to the same character style is probably the way to go in a situation like this. Then I'd load the text styles from the first (master) document so I could reuse them for new documents with the same product names.

    • #62110
      Anonymous
      Inactive

      What I was getting at was being able to extract the “Ignored words” that are already there. Then next time you opened the document or future versions, or create new documents. You could point a script to a list of words that you definitely don't want spell checked. This would then apply the character style for “No Language” to that list.

    • #62112

      I have a similar problem in our magazine. Each edition has many names of people that are specific to the edition. Since we work in almost sixty countries the permutations of names gets pretty diverse and some are close to English — Thon, Utooni, Kola are a few in the current issue.

      The weakness of using the “No Language” is that it is a Character Style attribute. Option + click to clear local formatting and the No language setting disappears.

      My current solution is to store the proper names in the document. This is one of the options as you spell check. You can, when you find a word not in the User Dictionary, choose “Dictionary” and then “Target” the document rather than the User Dictionary, so that the name is stored in the document. The process is somewhat complicated because in the spell check process you need to continually click through to change the User Dictionary to document.

      This is crying out for a script, either to import a list of names/words into dictionary area of the document or to go through a document gathering up the words not in the dictionary and giving you the option to add them to the document dictionary area.

      Failing that, it would really help to change the default dictionary to the document. Most of my spell checking activity is dealing with proper nouns that are particular to the document not words that never made it into the user dictionary.

    • #62120
      Anonymous
      Inactive

      I have many things like

      €2m or €1.5bn or something similar, basically anything with €d+(m|bn)

      Also have many references to sections marked as “s123” or “s123a” etc.

      These always get flagged. Doing a spell check, imagine a 3,200 page book – requires a lot of “Ignore Always” – as the references can be

      “s123a”

      “s23535b”

      “ss229/22049”

      Then there's all sorts of words that are not actual real words, but are in a Tax world. But you can't add these to the dictionary as in a real world setting these would be spelled incorrectly lol.

      Is there any way for a Script to scan a document for misspelled words and give an option to include in the Ignore list prior to starting a spell check?

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