MadCap Software Forums

Ack!

A reality check?

In a topic type:

"Joe cancelled his order for shoes"

On my Flare 7.1 system, "cancelled" shows as misspelled.

Just me?

Thanks!

samjones6 wrote:A reality check?

More likely a region check.

A single "l" is valid in the US and double "l" using British English. Check that your topic does not have a different language applied, or that your project language hasn't changed.
I often see dodgy language settings on imported topics.

wclass wrote:

samjones6 wrote:A reality check?

More likely a region check.

A single "l" is valid in the US and double "l" using British English. Check that your topic does not have a different language applied, or that your project language hasn't changed.
I often see dodgy language settings on imported topics.

Either spelling is acceptable in the US.

Andrew wrote:Either spelling is acceptable in the US.

You win. That is right. The MS Word 2007 spell checker agrees with you. The following is considered %100 correct in MS Word 2007:

Joe canceled his trip to Mexico

Sally cancelled her trip to New York

However, in Flare 7.1, the above is NOT considered correct. The "cancelled" is flagged as wrong.

I am not going to report this bug (I am worn out submitting bugs, and I don't use spell check).

It is FYI to the community.

As Andrew has said - it's almost certainly your region settings. If your region is UK-English then 'Canceled' will be flagged as incorrect while 'Cancelled' will be correct. If your region is US-English 'Canceled' will be correct whilst 'Cancelled' will be flagged as incorrect.

Go to your Project Properties button, look at the Language tab and see what region you have set. If it's English (United States) - there's your answer and the very reason Flare is flagging 'Canceled' as incorrect - for that culture, it IS incorrect strictly speaking.

helen wrote:Go to your Project Properties button, look at the Language tab and see what region you have set. If it's English (United States) - there's your answer and the very reason Flare is flagging 'Canceled' as incorrect - for that culture, it IS incorrect strictly speaking.

Thanks!

I took a look, and it was set to "default"

Steps I took:

1) Set it to US English
2) Saved and closed the project, exited Flare
3) Restarted Flare, opened project
4) Went to Project Properties, it now looks like the below
5) Opened topic with word "cancelled" in it
6) This word still shows as incorrectly spelled.

I continue to believe this is a Flare bug, but am open to direction on how to better use Flare! (I am always open to such direction!)

No, it's not a bug.

If you set your local to US English (as you've said you did above) then the spelling of 'cancelled' is incorrect. In US English the correct spelling is 'canceled'. This is what Flare is telling you.

helen wrote:If you set your local to US English (as you've said you did above) then the spelling of 'cancelled' is incorrect. In US English the correct spelling is 'canceled'. This is what Flare is telling you.

Can you help me understand the source for "In US English there is only one l in cancelled" ?

Webster allows both spellings: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/cancelled

And MS Word, in US English mode allows both spellings.

And the Chrome and Firefox browsers in US English mode allow both spellings.

Why should Flare, in US English mode, only allow one variant?

Thank you!

helen wrote:As Andrew has said - it's almost certainly your region settings. If your region is UK-English then 'Canceled' will be flagged as incorrect while 'Cancelled' will be correct. If your region is US-English 'Canceled' will be correct whilst 'Cancelled' will be flagged as incorrect.

Andrew wrote: "Either spelling is acceptable in the US."

Andrew seemed to be indicating that if my project was set to UK English that there would be a problem.

Do I misunderstand?

Acceptable use maybe, strictly correct, no. Wclass was correct when they said your issue was related to region, nothing more. The Oxford dictionary clearly indicates that the US spelling is with one 'l' and the UK spelling is with two 'l's. There are a ton of these subtle spelling differences between the US and US English which often rattle readears if you get them mixed up. I'm glad Flare is so strict rather than anything-goes-word, just the way I like it!

helen wrote:The Oxford dictionary clearly indicates that the US spelling is with one 'l' and the UK spelling is with two 'l's.

OED is certainly a valid authority.

But:

- Can you find another piece of software (prevalent software) that is strict the way Flare is?

I have tried four super-popular spell checkers, and none of them is strict in this way.


- Webster dictionary allows both spellings as US forms.

Why should the Flare spell checker vary from valid forms in Miriam Webster?

Who would misspell canselld, anyway?

samjones6 wrote:Can you find another piece of software (prevalent software) that is strict the way Flare is?

Yes, both OpenOffice and LibreOffice (OK, they are basically one and the same) flag "cancelled" as misspelled when using English (USA). I cannot check what it flags as right or wrong for English (UK), because I did not install that language pack.

samjones6 wrote:- Webster dictionary allows both spellings as US forms.

Why should the Flare spell checker vary from valid forms in Miriam Webster?

Because Webster is not always right. The Webster dictionary at times includes even words that don't exist in English, such as "dord". In all fairness, that is an extremely rare case, but Webster is just another private company that sells books. Why should they be the sole grail keepers of the English (or in this case American) language? As far as I know there is no single entity that is considered the infallible and official authority for English or American. Even the Oxford dictionary is published by Oxford Press, a private company that has no ties to Oxford University, although they conveniently keep quiet about that fact for marketing reasons.
Other languages are have such entities, such as L'Académie française for French (France) or the Orthografiekonferenz for German, which is not a permanent body like the L'Académie. Both are a bunch of senile nut jobs that destroy their own language under the pretence/pretense to protect it, but that's a different discussion.

That said, I honestly do not know who Miriam Webster is. I look forward to meeting her.

samjones6 wrote:

helen wrote:As Andrew has said - it's almost certainly your region settings. If your region is UK-English then 'Canceled' will be flagged as incorrect while 'Cancelled' will be correct. If your region is US-English 'Canceled' will be correct whilst 'Cancelled' will be flagged as incorrect.

Andrew wrote: "Either spelling is acceptable in the US."

Andrew seemed to be indicating that if my project was set to UK English that there would be a problem.

Do I misunderstand?

I don't know if either spelling is acceptable in the UK; I merely know either is acceptable in the US. Yes, even "strictly." (As long as it is consistent.)

For what it's worth (which is very little), I'm sure MadCap didn't actually develop their own language dictionaries. I'm sure they procured dictionary libraries somewhere. Developing a dictionary would be a huge waste of time. I've certainly run across a number of issues with the dictionary, and with Flare's handling of it (e.g., across tag borders or line breaks in some cases). Perhaps if enough people complain, they will change their provider.

If you prefer the behavior of the Word spell checker, you can create a Word target and dump everything into it and run your "whole project" spell check in there. This is what I do; the in-line spell check in Flare works nice to catch errors while typing, but I don't like the experience of trying to spell check a whole project in Flare.

I suppose if you expect to find a whole bunch of errors then this is not really feasible, but usually I only find a small handful of typos at the end of a project so it's not a big deal to navigate back into Flare to make the corrections manually.

whunter wrote:If you prefer the behavior of the Word spell checker, you can create a Word target and dump everything into it and run your "whole project" spell check in there. This is what I do; the in-line spell check in Flare works nice to catch errors while typing, but I don't like the experience of trying to spell check a whole project in Flare.

I suppose if you expect to find a whole bunch of errors then this is not really feasible, but usually I only find a small handful of typos at the end of a project so it's not a big deal to navigate back into Flare to make the corrections manually.

You are a real Flare patriot!

Very impressive workflow.

My solution: Turn off Flare spell check completely and forget about it. Just another Flare feature that is only %98 baked and causes me more grief than benefit.

Ah yes, when one runs out of arguments, fall back to mindless Flare bashing.
There is not a single thing wrong with how the Flare spell checks comes to its conclusions and it is not the only app behaving that way. Maybe switching languages will help, Solresol doesn't have those issues.....

RamonS wrote:Ah yes, when one runs out of arguments, fall back to mindless Flare bashing.

Ummmmm,

I asked the community for examples of ANY widely used software that behaves the way Flare does.

My point is simply:

Flare diverges from standard behavior (defined as how MS Word, Chrome, FireFox and other applications behave in this regard, AND from acceptable use of spelling as defined by the Miriam Webster dictionary.

In my book, that is a Flare bug.

If you are OK with Flare having unique behaviors that cannot be found anywhere else on earth, that is your call!

It's not a bug and the same behavior is found in other applications. If you think other apps are better I recommend you use them.

Just a quick comment on the original 'cancelled' point.

For an authoring tool, I'd prefer a spell-checker to only allow one spelling for a word, as I would want the spelling to be consistent throughout my document; otherwise you could have different spellings of the same word in a document, which doesn't look good.
(Ideally, I'd like more control over the core dictionary though.)

For a spell-checker in a browser, then you'd probably want things to be more relaxed, and allow any valid spelling of a word.

Dave Lee wrote:Just a quick comment on the original 'cancelled' point.

For an authoring tool, I'd prefer a spell-checker to only allow one spelling for a word, as I would want the spelling to be consistent throughout my document; otherwise you could have different spellings of the same word in a document, which doesn't look good.
(Ideally, I'd like more control over the core dictionary though.)

For a spell-checker in a browser, then you'd probably want things to be more relaxed, and allow any valid spelling of a word.

Which all goes back to the discussion we had a while back, it would be interesting if Flare could have some system for enforcing company / department styles and diction. That's my "holy grail" for this discussion.

Seems like variables would be a more efficient "system for enforcing company / department styles and diction" than spell check.


Good luck,
Leon

crdmerge wrote:Seems like variables would be a more efficient "system for enforcing company / department styles and diction" than spell check.

Not really, as they can't help people select the correct words, locutions, etc.

See the thread starting at this post for a discussion of what I was referring to.

RamonS wrote:It's not a bug and the same behavior is found in other applications.

What other apps?

Not MS Office... not the web browsers...

Please name the other apps you refer to. Thanks!

I already did, see above.