Spell check question

[Alison Stewart]

The spelling checker in Flare (v9) doesn't seem to pick up a missing space at the beginning of a sentence. So when I finish a sentence and my fingers (quite frequently) forget to add a space after the full stop (period), this is not picked up as a typo. For example with 'Select the appropriate profile.If you do not ...' Flare does not spot that there should be a space before 'If', whereas if I do the spell check in Word it is picked up. As I actually want to output directly to PDF I would prefer not to have to use Word just to check the spelling. Does anyone know if there is a way to set this up in Flare?

[sdcinvan]

You are absolutely correct.

Furthermore, I looked and could not find any spell checker options. For instance, the spell checker doesn't seem to recognize hyphenated words.

Also, I would like the spell checker to recognize one of my pet peeves, double spacing after punctuation. This is a little bit of a problem for me when I import text from non-technical writers. Why oh why do so many people add double spaces

Looks like it is time to add another feature request.
https://www.madcapsoftware.com/feedback ... quest.aspx

[LTinker68]

Also, I would like the spell checker to recognize one of my pet peeves, double spacing after punctuation. This is a little bit of a problem for me when I import text from non-technical writers.

This might not be as big of a problem as you think. Double spaces aren't recognized in HTML. It may look in the editor like you're entering a bunch of spaces, but when you look at the page-behind code, there's only the single space. (Unless you hold the Shift key while pressing the spacebar, of course.)

I don't generally import content, though, so I don't know if Flare strips out extra spaces during imports or if it tries to honor them by using the CDATA tag. If that's the case, then you can perhaps to a find-and-replace to strip those out. Or, better yet, use Word's find-and-replace to strip them out before importing them into Flare. I know some other users on the forums have macros or lists of steps they perform to clean up Word files before they import them. Perhaps someone can write up the steps of what they normally do to prepare a Word doc for importing.

Why oh why do so many people add double spaces

Because old-school users are used to doing that. And I have other people who do it, not necessarily out of an old-school habit, but because some newer fonts are so narrow or stylistic looking that it sometimes looks like you have no spaces between a period and the start of the next sentence, so they add an extra space to make it obvious. Calibri, especially, sometimes looks like you don't have sufficient spacing between words or sentences.

[sdcinvan]

...This might not be as big of a problem as you think. Double spaces aren't recognized in HTML.

I just had to test this. Cool, you are absolutely correct!

I can't get a double space, even if I import the text (from Notepad). Now I feel a little bit better.

[Rona Kwestel]

Here's another chink in the spell checker armor. It doesn't seem to detect the problem where this underlying html code:

Code: Select all

<span class="fancy">There is no space between this fancy text</span>and this plain text.

resolves to this output:

There is no space between this fancy textand this plain text.

If you're editing in the Text Editor, it's very easy to spot these missing spaces, but in the XML Editor, when you add the span tag to a piece of text, it's harder to see that you've clobbered the space. It would be nice if the spell checker could flag "textand" as an error.

Missing_space.png

[ChoccieMuffin]

Here's another chink in the spell checker armor. It doesn't seem to detect the problem where this underlying html code:

Code: Select all

<span class="fancy">There is no space between this</span>and this.

resolves to this output:

There is no space between this fancy textand this plain text.

If you're editing in the Text Editor, it's very easy to spot these missing spaces, but in the XML Editor, when you add the span tag to a piece of text, it's harder to see that you've clobbered the space. It would be nice if the spell checker could flag "textand" as an error.

Missing_space.png

It would be nice to be able to select this optionally, as it's not always wrong (for example if you use conditions for onscreen and print, you might not WANT a space between them). But yes, it is a big pain and one of the most common errors when proofreading my stuff.

[dorcutt]

One of the reasons why I keep a Word output for everything is this exact reason, actually. I run the spell check in my Word output to catch this error.

[Rona Kwestel]

Agreed, Choccie, that there are cases in the code where it's not wrong, but ideally the spell check would happen in the "preview" mode rather than the XML Editor or code mode, where you could specify which condition sets it should cycle through to test the resulting outputs.

Yes, dorcutt, Alison also uses Word to catch these types of errors, but as she pointed out, it seems crazy to have to generate Word output just for the sake of more robust spell checking.

Oh, I fixed a mismatch in my original post between the sample code and the output.