Basic Working Procedures > Editing Topic Files

In addition to manual spell checking for individual topics, selected text and your entire project you can also use live spell checking (misspelled words are highlighted as you type). You can also create your own user dictionaries with lists of special terms for your own projects, auto-correct entries and terms that you want to identify as incorrect even though they are in the main dictionary. User dictionaries can be global for all projects or local for just one project and can be stored anywhere you like.

See The Spell Checker in the Tools Included with Help & Manual chapter for full details on configuring the spell checker.

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.

Select the language:

Go to Project > Tools > Spelling > Configure Spell Checker > Dictionaries and select the correct dictionary for the language you want to check in the Main Dictionaries section:

You can spell check documents that contain multiple languages by selecting more than one main dictionary. Click on Download dictionaries... to download free dictionaries for additional languages. These dictionaries must be stored in the Dictionaries folder in your Help & Manual program directory.

Select the user dictionaries:

All user dictionaries listed in the Custom Dictionaries section will also be used for spell checks. You can store these dictionaries anywhere you want, also on network drives, and multiple users can access the same dictionary at the same time.

Select When adding words, use this dictionary: to choose the user dictionary you want to use to store new words.

See The Spell Checker for full details on configuring the spell checker.

Go to Tools > Spelling > Configure Spell Checker and activate the Check spelling as you type option.

Unknown words are highlighted with a wavy red underline. Right-click on a highlighted word (or click on it and press the context menu key on your keyboard if you have one) to display alternatives.

Select Spelling in the context menu to open a full manual spell checker window.

Note that the live spell checker does not mark repeated words as errors. This is only marked by the manual spell checker.

Selected text, current topic or current text entry field or window:

Select text in the editor and click on the top part of the Spelling tool in Project > Tools.

Current topic, all topics, table of contents:

Click on the bottom part of the Spelling tool and select Current Topic, All Topics or Table of Contents.

When an unknown word is found the following dialog is displayed:

	Skips this occurrence of the unknown word without correcting it and continues the spell check.
	Skips the unknown word and all future occurrences of the word. Applies for the current spell check session only.
	Changes this occurrence of the unknown word and continues with the spell check. You can type a word manually in the Replace with: field or click on a word in the Suggestions: list.
	Changes both this occurrence and all future occurrences of the unknown word without prompting for confirmation. Applies for the current spell check session only.
	Adds the unknown word to the current custom dictionary (see below).
	Adds the unknown word and its replacement to the Auto-Correct list in the current custom user dictionary. When this unknown word is encountered in future manual spell checks it will be corrected automatically without prompting for confirmation.

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 spell checker has an Auto-Correct feature that can be used to automatically replace words with other words when they are encountered in manual spell checks.

1.	Set up your user dictionary and enter words you want to correct in the Auto-Correct Pairs (see Creating and editing custom dictionaries for details).

2.	To add new Auto-Correct Pairs during manual spell checks enter the correct word you want to use, then click on Auto-Correct to add the pair to the current user dictionary.

This word pair will be corrected automatically from now on when you use this dictionary (also in the current session).