From the course: InDesign 2024 Essential Training

Checking spelling - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: InDesign 2024 Essential Training

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Checking spelling

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- [Instructor] Nobody spells everything right all the time. I mean, hey, that's what spell checking features are for. And fortunately there's a good one built into InDesign. Now, I have this long document file open from my exercise files folder, but before we send it to print, we'd better check the spelling. You can do that by going to the Edit menu, coming down to the Spelling sub-menu, and then choose Check Spelling, or you could press Cmd + i on the Mac or Ctrl + i on Windows. And as soon as you select that, up comes the Check Spelling dialog box, and InDesign immediately starts showing me suspect words. The first word is bellflowers, which I know is correct. So I'm going to go ahead and click the Skip button. Now the same word appears again, and I'm realizing this is going to get tiresome, skipping that repeatedly. So instead, I could click Ignore All. Ignore All is like pressing Skip for every instance that it finds. In fact, not just now, but every time you do a check spelling until the next time you quit InDesign. Now, if you always want InDesign to think this word is spelled correctly, not just this time, but tomorrow and next month, then consider adding it to your user dictionary. You can do that by clicking the Add button down here. That's what I'm going to do. I'll click Add and InDesign adds it to the user dictionary, and then moves on to the next word. By the way, note that you can spell check forward or backward through your document. Now, here this word, I know that's definitely wrong and I could type the correct version inside this field, but InDesign has given me a list of Suggested Corrections, so it's easier to just click one of those and then click Change. Okay, instead of checking one word at a time, there's another way to check my spelling. I'm going to click the Done button to close that dialog box. Now I'm going to go to the Edit menu again, go back to the Spelling submenu, and I'll turn on Dynamic Spelling. I like Dynamic Spelling because you can see at a glance whether something is spelled incorrectly. For example, let's zoom in here by pressing Cmd or Ctrl + 2. Because Dynamic Spelling is on, I can see all the words that InDesign thinks are misspelled. They all have this little red zigzag line under them. This way I can very quickly pan around looking for things that might be spelled wrong. Now, I could just click inside this word and fix it, or I could place my cursor on top of it, and then right click or Ctrl + click with a one button mouse. And here in the context menu, it shows me some suggested words, what it thinks we're trying to spell here. So I'll just choose flowers and it fixes it. I also see some words here that have a green underline. Green means they're not misspelled, but there's something else wrong with them. For example, down here it's obvious that a word is duplicated, so I'll delete one of them and the green line goes away. Up here it's telling me that that T should be capitalized, so I can fix that too. Alright, what's wrong down here? These words show up as misspelled, but I know they're not misspelled, they're just in Spanish. So how do I tell InDesign when a word is spelled correctly, but in a different language? The trick is to select it, go to the Control Panel or the Properties Panel. Make sure you're set to the character mode. And then way over here, choose a language from the Language popup menu. This shows all the different languages that InDesign knows about. There's Estonian and Finnish and Greek and so on. And if I scroll down, there's Spanish. I'll just click on that. And now the little underline goes away. InDesign checked its dictionaries, and it knows that these words are spelled correctly in that language. Okay, one more language trick that you should know about. See how InDesign thinks this is also misspelled? Well, I know that's not misspelled, it's just a web address. And URLs and email addresses almost always show up as misspelled. But what I can do is tell InDesign to skip it by changing its language. I'll select that, go back to my Language menu, and this time I'm going to scroll up all the way to the very top. I'll choose [No Language]. When I choose that InDesign stops trying to spell check it. Anything set to [No Language] will never show up as misspelled. Of course, just performing a spell check won't guarantee that your text is all correct. So finding a human proofreader is always a good idea, but do yourself and them a favor and run InDesign spell checking features first.

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