Thursday, July 21, 2011

Surpressing the Spell Checker with a Style

Enough of the PDF nonsense...it's time to get back to styles. We're about half way through what you can do with a style.

Remember that we are making global changes. When you make global changes, you access the dialogs by right-clicking a style in the Styles (or Styles and Formatting) pane to display a pop-up. Select the Modify option to display the Modify Styles dialog. You can then click the Format button for a list options. Tonight, we're going to look at the Language option.

You've seen this dialog before in the post about suppressing the spell checker. In most instances, you're going to accept the default language. The item of interest on this dialog is the Do not check spelling or grammar option.

Making a choice here is tricky but make the right choice and you have a helpful style.

If you are modifying a paragraph style--a style that you apply to an entire paragraph, do not select the Do not check spelling or grammar option, because every place that you apply the style will get skipped by the spell checker. Not a good thing unless you have supreme confidence in your spelling.

If you are modifying a character style--a style that you apply to a few characters like a family name or place name, you may want to consider selecting the Do not check spelling or grammar option. When you apply the style to an oddly spelled family name or place name, not only do you get the spiffy formatting built into the character style but you also automatically suppress the spell checker. If you're careful about the spelling of the family or place name, using this option as part of a character style is another way to avoid being annoyed by the spell checker getting hung up on these types of names.

We're almost through all of the global changes via Modify Style/Format selections. After we've gone through all of the global changes, we'll start looking at the local changes, which are frequently used to tweak text on a page mostly to make it fit on the page better.

So bear with me. We don't have far to go. After we look at local changes, we'll talk about building templates.

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