Productivity Tip

Spell checking is supported almost everywhere in Help & Manual where you can enter text. Just right-click to display the context menu or click on the upper half of the Spelling tool in the Project tab to access.

The Spelling tool in the Project tab is available almost everywhere in Help & Manual where you can enter text, including the HTML editors for HTML templates and code objects, the XML editor, the TOC captions in text entry mode and all of the text entry fields in the Configuration section of your project.

•Clicking on the top half of the Spelling tool checks selected text (if any is selected) OR the current topic or text entry field or window (if no text is selected).

•Clicking the bottom half of the Spelling tool displays the spell-check menu.

Select Tools > Spelling > Configure Spell Checker, then configure your options in the User Preferences tab.

Most of the settings here are self-explanatory. Here are a couple of notes on special functions:

Live spelling:
Identifies incorrect words with squiggly red underlines while you are working. Right-click on words with these underlines to display a spell-check menu. Does not support repeated words and dual capitals (see below)

Main dictionary only:
When this is active suggested corrections will be taken from the main dictionary for the current language only. No suggestions will be taken from your own user dictionaries.

Prompt on repeated word, correct Dual capitals:
These functions are not active for live spell checking. They are only supported in the interactive spell check started from with the Spelling tool in the Ribbon.

Select Tools > Spelling > Configure Spell Checker, then select the dictionary for the language of your project in the Dictionaries tab.

To add dictionaries for more languages click on Download dictionaries... These dictionary files must be unpacked (if they are in a zip or other archive file) and saved in the \dictionaries folder in the Help & Manual program directory.

The main dictionaries are not editable. However, you can create custom user dictionaries to store your own additional terms. These dictionaries can also store auto-correct word pairs and "excluded" words that you want to always identify as incorrect even if they are in the main dictionary.

See Using custom dictionaries and Creating and editing custom dictionaries for full details on this subject.

•The standard user dictionary is stored in your My Documents folder (called Documents in Windows Vista). To use this just select it in the When adding words, use this dictionary list at the bottom of the dialog.

•Click on Add/New to create a new user dictionary or to select an existing dictionary. You can store your dictionary anywhere you like.

•If you only want to use the selected dictionaries for the current project activate Selected dictionaries are used for this help project only. Otherwise your selections will be stored for all projects.

The settings in the Ignore List tab exclude text formatted with specific styles from spell checking. This makes it possible to prevent spell checking for text where it would not make sense, for example in quoted text in other languages.

1.Select Tools > Spelling > Configure Spell Checker and click on the Ignore List tab.

2.Select the check boxes of all the styles you want to exclude from checking.

All text formatted with the selected styles will be ignored by the spell checker.