Rechecking spelling (was: Re: Life Threatening Situation!)

[Philip Sharman <sharman -at- WOWMEDIA -dot- COM>]

"D. Margulis" wrote:
>... if you inadvertently accept a
>word (because of a trigger finger), you remove the marker and the word
>in question is forever deemed acceptable, whether it is correct or not.
>
>Programs do vary in the way they handle global acceptance, custom
>dictionaries, grammar checking, and other features; but I am not aware
>of any that will rescan a word once you have accepted it.

FrameMaker has a little-known ability to clear mistaken acceptances of
misspellings.  (At a previous company we were forced to find out how to do
this.  We inherited documents from a previous employee, who couldn't spell
worth a darn.  Every time FrameMaker found a spelling mistake he would
swear that FrameMaker didn't know how to spell, and blithely accept it!)

The easiest case to correct (and the most common case) is where someone has
used FrameMaker's "Allow In Document" button on the spellchecker dialog.
This adds the word to the "document dictionary".  To clear the document
dictionary:
1) Open the spellchecker dialog box (via Edit>Spelling Checker).
2) Click "Dictionaries".
3) Select "Document Dictionary > Clear".
4) Click "OK".
5) Click "Dictionaries" again.
6) Select "Mark All Paragraphs for Rechecking".
7) Click "OK".
8) Click "Start Checking".

This has the disadvantage of wiping out all the legitimate words you
accepted for that document too, but c'est la vie.

You may also way to stop FrameMaker from making automatic corrections:
1) Open the spellchecker dialog box.
2) Click "Dictionaries".
3) Select "Clear Automatic Corrections".
4) Click "OK".

If you've mistakenly added misspellings to your personal dictionary (by
clicking "Learn" on the spellchecker), you can edit it too.  (See "Editing
Dictionary Files" in Chapter 3 of the FrameMaker manual.  It's on page 71
in my copy.)

If you are really paranoid you can consider whether your site dictionary
(if you use it) is correct too ....

You may also wish to look at the Options dialog box, available from the
spellchecker, and see what you've told FrameMaker to ignore.  If you've
told it to ignore uppercase words, you can't blame it for not checking them
for you.

By the way, while we're on the topic of spelling ... did you know that when
FrameMaker checks the spelling of a document it does _not_ check the
spelling of index entries.  So, it is very wise to run the spellchecker on
the index file separately.  (Guess how I learned that? Sigh. :-)

Regards,
   Philip Sharman,
   <sharman -at- wowmedia -dot- com>