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 top part of the Spelling tool to spell check the current topic.

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:

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).