Spell Checking in Flare

[sfisk]

I am new to Flare and need some coaching on the spell checker.

I am working on a new project. Most of the content was pasted from MS Word. I was under a deadline to complete some work on the project and ran the spell checker yesterday to try to catch problems.

I opened the spell check window, chose the “whole project” option, and started the spell check. It found a number of problems, which I fixed, ignored, or skipped. When the check was done I saved all and decided to re-run spell check just to be sure, again using the whole project option. To my surprise it found a whole new set of problems, some of which were the same items found on the first pass, but in different locations. For example the original content had ie and eg without periods or a comma. I fixed all found on the first pass but more showed up on the second pass, which I fixed again. To make a long story shorter I ran spell check three more times (total of five) and it kept finding more problems. In some cases it kept finding words that I added to the dictionary!

I finally gave up after the fifth try and decided to generate a print version and check it in Word. The problem with checking outside of Flare, in Word, is that the organization of content in Flare, at least in this case, is completely different than what appears in the Word version. As a result, finding and correcting a problem found on page X in Word proved to be very time consuming. It was counter-productive to say the least.

Disturbingly I found problems in Word that the Flare spell check had missed, or possibly not fixed. While spell checking in Flare I clicked Save many times (index finger is shorter today), to be sure changes were not lost. That effort has, as a result, greatly complicated my ability to make an important deadline. I did not expect this problem at all.

I hope it’s just because I am a newbie and have missed something obvious but at this point it appears the spell check feature in Flare is seriously dysfunctional. It also lacks a grammar checker.

The ability to reliably and accurately check for both spelling and grammar problems in content is a profoundly important requirement if one is concerned about producing quality documentation. Having to do this outside of Flare is not practical as near as I can tell.

Have I missed something here? Have others experienced this problem? Is it an urgent flaw that needs immediate attention?

[KevinDAmery]

I typically work with Spell Check While Typing turned on (it's in the Tools menu just above the Spell Check feature). I've found it works pretty well. That way when I do an edit for content / punctuation / etc. I can visually look for spelling errors as well.

[sfisk]

I typically work with Spell Check While Typing turned on (it's in the Tools menu just above the Spell Check feature). I've found it works pretty well. That way when I do an edit for content / punctuation / etc. I can visually look for spelling errors as well.

That does not help when you are working with imported content. BTW, I do have that turned on.

[KevinDAmery]

I typically work with Spell Check While Typing turned on (it's in the Tools menu just above the Spell Check feature). I've found it works pretty well. That way when I do an edit for content / punctuation / etc. I can visually look for spelling errors as well.

That does not help when you are working with imported content. BTW, I do have that turned on.

You mean it's not underlining words in your imported content?

[sfisk]

I typically work with Spell Check While Typing turned on (it's in the Tools menu just above the Spell Check feature). I've found it works pretty well. That way when I do an edit for content / punctuation / etc. I can visually look for spelling errors as well.

That does not help when you are working with imported content. BTW, I do have that turned on.

You mean it's not underlining words in your imported content?

It may be, I am not sure, but that is a totally impractical way to do a spell check on imported content. I am dealing with quite a few topics, some that are fairly long. Having scroll through every topic manually, looking for red squiggly underlines when the errors involve one or two letters is virtually impossible. No one should have to do that. The spell checker should work at least as well as the one in Word, and Flare should also have a solid grammar checker!

For that matter so should this forum area.

[KevinDAmery]

Ok, I guess we have a different way of working. I haven't run a specific spell check pass in years, to be honest (pre-dating my work in Flare by a long way). However, I also won't let anything out without copy and content editing it--and that's when I also check for the red lines.

As far as grammar checkers go, I'd hope for one better than Word has. I've lost track of how many times Word has incorrectly insisted that I change something that needs to be singular into plural.

[sfisk]

Ok, I guess we have a different way of working. I haven't run a specific spell check pass in years, to be honest (pre-dating my work in Flare by a long way). However, I also won't let anything out without copy and content editing it--and that's when I also check for the red lines.

As far as grammar checkers go, I'd hope for one better than Word has. I've lost track of how many times Word has incorrectly insisted that I change something that needs to be singular into plural.

I totally agreee that Word is not as good as it needs to be, which is why I said Flare needs to be "at least as good as" Word.

Again, I am dealing with inherited content and very short deadlines. I am not a happy camper on this and was very much hoping I could depend on Flare to help catch problems without having to spend a lot of time in the effort. This has not been the case!

[srnowlin]

Not to revive an old topic frivolously -- but I didn't see any point in creating a new topic with the same title. So, I'll post my question here.

I have spell-check-while-typing turned on. The problem I'm having is that it's flagging words that are correctly spelled as incorrect. It looks like it's comparing American standard spellings against "The King's English" and indicating the American standard is the incorrect spelling. This is an imported document from Robohelp 5.x. Is there some place where I can convert the dictionary to American Standard? European English is cool and all, but it's not making my job easier.

Thanks!

[KevinDAmery]

In the topic properties, you can set the language for each topic. You can change it by selecting the topic in the Content Explorer and hitting F4, then going to the language page in the properties. Unfortunately, you'll have to change it for each topic--it isn't a global setting.

You can tell which language is active by looking in the upper left: there will be a flag indicating the nationality of that language (my guess is yours currently shows either a British flag or a Canadian flag--obviously you want an American flag).

[srnowlin]

Well my pages were (waah there are a lot) seem to be set default, apparently. There is no flag when I look in the tag properties, but as soon as I changed it from default to English (United States) my flag appears.

Ho Hum, is there place to go change the "default" for future page creations??

I'm using Flare 3.1.0 btw, I guess I should have mentioned that.

[doc_guy]

What are your Windows language settings? I don't know for sure, but I'm guessing Flare is basing this off of your system language preferences.

[wclass]

You can set a default language for the project using the menu option Project > Project Properties... and selecting the Language tab.

[doc_guy]

... or you could go there...

Yeah. I'd try that first.

[srnowlin]

I was about to say, me windows language be Engrish, Americana-style.

Seriously, it's American English too. So I'll set via the Project Properties. Apparently Default is Canadian English?

[LTinker68]

Either it picks the default language off your system settings or the default is American English. I seem to recall when you launch Flare for the first time it asks what language you want to use; perhaps you inadvertently selected Canadian English at that time. I have the screen set to never show up again and I don't remember how it's laid out, but that might be the problem.

BTW, you can set the language for all the topics at once from the File List pane. Although I believe someone else mentioned that if they made too many changes at once in too many topics that it locked up Flare, so if that happens you might want to select fewer topics to modify at a time.

[doc_guy]

I'm pretty sure that the dialog when you first launch Flare is to make you select the interface language, not the default language for topics. But you could confirm this by deleting all MadCap registry entries from your registry. You'd have to re-register Flare after you did this (which is why I'm going to pass), but if you really want to see that dialog again, you can get it back by resetting your registry.

[SteveS]

On Monday I deleted all my Flare registry entries (wonderful coincidence, that)...

Yes, the startup dialog is for interface language which you can opt out of. Choices are English, French, German, and Japanese.

You can re-enable the dialog via tools -> options -> general and choose the show select UI language dialog on startup option.

[wclass]

Here's a summary:

Language for spell checking topics:

• You can select the default language in the wizard when you create a new project.
• To change the default language for the project, use Project > Project Properties ...
• You can set a language just for an individual topic using the Topic Properties dialog. This is when the little flag is displayed in the xml editor.
• You can change the language for many topics at once using the file list view.
• For the technically minded, if a topic has a different languange, an attribute is set in the html tag that can be seen in the code. This attribute is removed if set back to the default.

Language for the Flare interface:

• You can choose your UI language when you start Flare, but you can set a flag so that this dialog is not displayed on start-up.
• You can turn the dialog back on using Tools > Options > General ...

[KevinDAmery]

Apparently Default is Canadian English?

Don't think so (although it would certainly be handy for me if it were ) My guess is something in the RH import got Flare thinking it should use a different language setting.

[srnowlin]

Apparently Default is Canadian English?

Don't think so (although it would certainly be handy for me if it were ) My guess is something in the RH import got Flare thinking it should use a different language setting.

Perhaps so, I can't see how, RH was set to American Standard English too, so was this project. Just one of those weirdings. It's fixed now and now my editor/mentor can stop pulling her hair out over my "gue's"

Thanks everyone!!

[LTinker68]

Here's a summary...

Very good summary, wclass.

[binarybunny]

I have approximately 3000 topics contained within 73 main folders and 30 sub folders. The options for spell check are to run a check on the entire project, by folder, or individual topic only. Since most of my topics were imported from RH or Word, the latter is a pain to go through one by one.

Run on the entire project/by folder? HA! It crashes and does not exit gracefully after looping through 25 topics. I can't get around that. I have 2GB RAM - do I need more? The project weighs in at a whopping 12 MB.

Thanks,

[NorthEast]

Yep, Flare does fall over a bit too often for my liking, and a lot of crashes seem to be when it's doing processes that involve handling a large number of files. I can think of 2 or 3 activities that will reliably bring it down.

[carolynmwallace]

Another spell checking question: How do you get the Flare spell check to ignore punctuation marks, specifically slashes (/) and quotation marks (")?

My docs have a lot of web addresses (http://...) and Spell Check keeps reporting each second slash as a repeated word. Similarly, if I use quotation marks back-to-back (as in "GUI," "Interfaces," and "Documentation"), it reports the third quotation mark as a repeated word.

If I could just get it to ignore those instances, my spell checking would get done a lot faster!

I'm using Flare 2.5.2.

[BL_N]

A peep from the sidelines: Perhaps an auto-correct or ignore function would be helpful for things like the URL issue?