Checking Spelling

Arbortext Editor automatically checks your document for spelling errors and marks any suspect words with a red wavy line. When a word is highlighted in this way, you can right click on the word and the Spelling shortcut menu will appear, allowing you to perform the same actions as are available in the Spelling dialog box.

The spell checking system uses up to three file lists simultaneously:

• A language dictionary — By default Arbortext Editor features a spell checker that checks words against an English language Proximity/Merriam-Webster Linguibase.

Dictionaries for other languages can also be specified, as can an English medical terminology or legal terminology dictionary file.

• An exception dictionary — A file containing lists of terms that you designated to be accepted or rejected when spell-checking documents.

You can choose to also spell check the contents of file entities in the Edit category of the Tools > Preferences dialog box. Check the box for Search File Entities on Find. The set entityscan advanced preference setting also controls this setting.

Preferences for spell checking are located in the Spelling category of the Preferences dialog box. You can open spelling preferences by clicking Options in the Spelling dialog box.

Use the Spelling dialog box to check a single word, a highlighted section, or the entire document.

To check spelling using the Spelling dialog box:

If no error is encountered, a message appears in the status bar saying that no misspelled words were found.

To correct a misspelled word:

1. The Spelling dialog box appears with the misspelled word shown in the Not in Dictionary option.

The Suggestions option contains suggested words to replace your misspelled word. The top suggestion appears in the Change to option.

If the word is one that is actually spelled correctly, you can also click Add to add that word to your exception dictionary and continue the spell check. If the word is spelled correctly but you do not want to add it to your dictionary, you can click Ignore to have the spell check ignore the word for this single occurrence or Ignore All to have spell checking ignore the word for the current Arbortext Editor session.

2. If one of the words in the Suggestions list is the correctly spelled word, click on that word.

The flagged word is replaced with the word in the Change to option. If the spelling to be changed occurs inside a DMS object that is writable (not read-only or checked out by another user), then the object will be checked out for edit. You will be prompted to confirm the check out.

Note that if the Change to option is empty or the spell checker has found a repeated word, the name of the Change button turns to Delete and will remove the flagged word from the document.

Note that when a misspelled word has an element embedded in the word, the corrected word is placed before the embedded element. For example, if you correct the misspelled word back<emphasis>wrads, Arbortext Editor places the corrected word before the element as follows: backwards<emphasis>.

Arbortext Editor enables you to spell check multiple languages in the same document. The default language for spell checking is determined by the language dictionary selected in the spelling preferences. However, you can set a language attribute on individual tags to have them spell checked using the dictionary for a specific language. The language attribute for a document is determined in the following way:

• If the document has an associated Arbortext Styler.style file, the language attribute of the one designated in that stylesheet.

• Otherwise, the attribute is the one designated in the document type configuration (.dcf) file for the document’s document type.

If no language attribute is set on a tag, then the value is inherited from the closest ancestor that sets the language. If no language is set anywhere in the tag’s ancestors, then the preference language is used in all cases.

When you set the language attribute to a specific language code (for example, xml:lang=”fr”), then the spell checker uses the language dictionary for the designated language to check the content of that tag. If a tag specifies a language that is not supported, then that tag’s content is not spell checked. Also, a word with characters not expected in the current language (such as a Thai or Chinese word in an English paragraph) is ignored and will not be flagged as a misspelling.