5 Replies Latest reply: Jun 26, 2013 3:51 AM by alanomaly

Make spellcheck treat reference numbers as not part of a word?

alanomaly Jun 25, 2013 9:38 AM

Is there any way to make InDesign's spellcheck ignore note references in words - for example, by character style, or just making it treat changes in character style mid-word as a new word?

InDesign's spellcheck is... not exactly cutting edge. One of its quirks is, in a sentence like this (imagine the 4 is superscript)...

Some words²in some text have references. Some^bhave footnotes.

...it will flag up "words2" and "Someb" as incorrect spelling. In documents with lots of references and/or footnotes, this is a big pain, and it can also cause errors: for example if you are setting text that contains typos and you correct-all on a typo "thisa" from a chunky-fingered author accidently hitting "s" and "a" at the same time, it could also remove the note reference from this^a - damaging the content in a way which a proofreader would struggle to spot unless they knew the content inside out.

I've tried setting the language of the footnote/reference/endnote character styles to "no language", but it doesn't make any difference. It seems like the language of the first letter of a word decides the language of the whole word - it seems it's not smart enough to realise that if a word is in English and the last character is not in any language, then that last character isn't part of the English word.

It might be possible to create some crazy GREP rule that applies 'no language' style to any word containing a number - but ideally, if I have some text " Some wrods²in some text" I want spell check to flag up that the part of "wrods²" that is a set to the English language is spelt wrongly.

If the spell check feature is one of these ancient things Adobe has long ago abandorned caring about, maybe there's some other way, e.g. to use character styles to add some kind of zero-space word breaking whitespace to the start of each reference/footnote character style?

1. Re: Make spellcheck treat reference numbers as not part of a word?

Peter Spier Jun 25, 2013 9:59 AM (in response to alanomaly)

Spell check ignores text marke as "no language" so if you add that to your character style it should do what you want.
Like Show 0 Likes (0)

Actions
2. Re: Make spellcheck treat reference numbers as not part of a word?

Peter Spier Jun 25, 2013 10:08 AM (in response to Peter Spier)

OK, I see you tried that and it didn't work.... and id didn't work here either when I tried it, but adding a hair space in front of the superscript does.
Like Show 0 Likes (0)

Actions
3. Re: Make spellcheck treat reference numbers as not part of a word?

alanomaly Jun 25, 2013 10:20 AM (in response to Peter Spier)

I considered that - is there any way to have the hair-space added as part of the character style? Or some other way ot make it appear automatically? I don't want to manually type them all in and I'd rather not use find-change for this if possible - it's a team effort and it's better to have something that can be set up once than add another thing everyone needs to remember.

Also, what would you use as the word-breaking minimal space character?
Like Show 0 Likes (0)

Actions
4. Re: Make spellcheck treat reference numbers as not part of a word?

Peter Spier Jun 25, 2013 10:36 AM (in response to alanomaly)

A discretionary line break also seems to work, and it's zero-width unlike the hair space which is very narrow, but not 0. I was worried that the discretionary break might allow a line to break between the word and its superscript component, but so far that hasn't happened in my testing. Might be good to also format withteh same character style, too, though and add No Break to the style.

Bad news is you can't add text using a GREP style, only change the format, so there's no way other than find/change or a script to insert the character.
Like Show 0 Likes (0)

Actions
5. Re: Make spellcheck treat reference numbers as not part of a word?

alanomaly Jun 26, 2013 3:51 AM (in response to Peter Spier)
For me, discretionary line breaks don't stop the entries creeping into the spellcheck (CS6, UK English).

Hair spaces work reasonably well - I've countered the small space by adding a GREP rule to the base paragraph style that adds a "tight tracking" character style to ~|

It turned out to not be easy to make a GREP find/change that adds a hair space only to snippets that don't already contain a hair space (since you may need to run the find/change more than once). After a lot of trial and error I figured this out:

(with the character style specified)

Find: (?<!.)[^~|]+(?!.)
Change: ~|$0
Like Show 0 Likes (0)

Actions

Go to original post

Make spellcheck treat reference numbers as not part of a word?

1. Re: Make spellcheck treat reference numbers as not part of a word?

2. Re: Make spellcheck treat reference numbers as not part of a word?

3. Re: Make spellcheck treat reference numbers as not part of a word?

4. Re: Make spellcheck treat reference numbers as not part of a word?

5. Re: Make spellcheck treat reference numbers as not part of a word?

Actions

More Like This

Legend