Spell Checking

[mymojo]

Ok, I have warm thoughts towards Flare (so far...) and convinced my company to buy it as my holy grail of lone writer-ness.

But for some reason, I have had sooo many issues thus far. Trying to build a PDF throws an error, spell checking the whole project is a joke, and trying to enter an index word throws another error. Fine. I've submitted requests for attention to those issues (though I would love to hear thoughts from anyone who has battled these issues and won).

Does anyone know why on earth my "Spell Check While Typing" doesn't work? I've set the project in English and made sure this option is enabled, and still nothing. Nada. I'm starting to wonder why I was in such a hurry to pull our docs out of the archaic depths of Word.

[doc_guy]

Welcome to the forums!

What error do you get when you are trying to build a PDF? What stage does the build get to before it crashes? That will tell you a lot about where the problem lies. Are you using page layouts? Can you build a CHM or WebHelp version of your project?

Does spell-check-while-typing work if you create a brand new project and start typing in an empty topic? I'm wondering if there is something weird with the project you're using.

We love to help, but I think we're going to need more information to narrow the scope of this one down before we're able to give you much useful advice. Then again, maybe somebody smarter than me already knows what your problem is, and they'll come along any minute and address it

[mymojo]

Thanks for your quick reply! It freaks out when it gets to updating cross-references, and I get an "Internal error: An item with the same key has already been added."

I definitely think it's my project. I could add indexes through the Analyzer, but then I deleted them all when I realized I'd added them to strange places. Now I get a "Unhandled exception.... Object reference not set to an instance of an object" when I try to add an index keyword.

To add to my issues, now I cannot paste any text from any other application but another Flare project. I get a "Failed to run command Paste"

The spell checker does work on other projects, just not this one.

I've tried making a new project and adding my topics from this one, and Flare just doesn't like them. It reacts the same way. The project was imported from Word originally.

[mymojo]

Oh, and I can build all other targets but the PDF (the one I really need).

[SteveS]

Quite often when trying a program for the first time you can inadverrtantly corrupt your data. (And can't do it again in the same way if you try - which makes it hard for the programmers to fix.) That might be what's happening here.

I'd try creating a new project and doing a fresh import from Word. There is lots of advice about Word imports in this forum, but my basic approach is to create a seperate Word file for each topic and import the documents/topics indivdually with as little mapping as possible and avoiding keeping the Word styles. (I normally map headings 1 to 4 to H1 to H4 and leave the rest to come as unformatted text). Once you have your topics and are happy with the import forget about opening them in Word ever again.

Once you have a clean project with topics you cam work with, make a backup of the entire project and start playing!

HTH

[mymojo]

Thanks Steve. That sounds like a lot of work considering how large my project is and how much work I've done, but I'm willing to give it a try if it will fix my myriad of issues.

Thanks for the post!

[SteveS]

Like all things - a good foundation is important.

If it will make things easier in the long run it can be worth restarting a project. (One of life's lessons learned the hard way. Repeatedly.)