From the course: InDesign Tips for Design Geeks

Quickly add "unknowns" to your User Dictionary - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: InDesign Tips for Design Geeks

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Quickly add "unknowns" to your User Dictionary

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- [Anne-Marie] Hello, it's Anne-Marie for "InDesign Tips for Design Geeks." Today I want to talk about a fast way to fix obnoxious spell checks. (laughing) I'm going to zoom in on this gardening catalog, and I've turned on Dynamic Spell Check, which you can do from the Edit menu, Spelling, Dynamic Spelling, which has InDesign automatically flag misspelled words with this jaggy red line underneath it. Let's get even closer. So what's happening is, it doesn't understand this word. It's not in the English dictionary. It's probably, you know, they don't have a Latin dictionary. So that wouldn't help very much, wait, do they? No, okay, phew. Anyway, so let's say that you're doing this catalog and you have hundreds of pages with the Latin names for various shrubs and flowers. And every single time that you go through spell check, it stops there and you need to right-click and say, "No, it's not Napoleonic, add this to the User Dictionary." And so on and so on. Do you have to go through 250 pages and click inside each of these frames to do that? No. What you should do is just add them all at once to your User Dictionary. How can you do that? I'll show you in this video. First, you need to get all the text that has these unrecognized terms into at least one big text frame. There's a number of scripts that will export or concatenate all these various text frames into a single one. And then once you do, I'm just going to click on one of these, then you go to File and choose Export. And save it out on the Desktop as a plain text only file. That's a requirement for importing words into your User Dictionary. It has to be a text only file. Now, it doesn't have to have, you know, every word is unique and doesn't already exist in your dictionary. I've already created this for you. (laughing) You know, just like Julia Child. So I exported a bunch of frames from that page to plain text, so here it is. And notice that a lot of these words are already in my dictionary, right? Upright and spreading and the word to. I don't care about that. Because it's wonderful that InDesign will ignore duplicates. Don't worry about it. So you don't have to go through each, go through this document and only put the strange terms on their own line. You can just leave it as is. Now, you might want to get rid of quotes. I've found that sometimes quotes mess it up. Or in case you have any other weird things that came through in the export. So do give it a glance, but there you go. So I have HanselandPetal_Catalog.txt. Now, go back to your document and find the dictionary interface. That's here in Spelling. Wherever you see Spelling, you'll see User Dictionary, okay? So here we're looking at User Dictionary. And these are the words that I have already added over the years to my User Dictionary. I want to also add the ones from this catalog. So I can just go to Import, and let's actually, wait, let's zoom in a bit so we can see what's happening. Let's go to Import. And we'll find the one that I just stuck on the Desktop. Add it to the dictionary, this whole thing. Click Open, boom, look at that. Huh? Isn't it beautiful? They're all spelled correctly. Pretty cool, huh? Now, the thing is, though, that this is only going to work on my computer. That might be all you want. If you need to share this dictionary with other people, then, what you need to do is watch the next video in this series where I show how to create a User Dictionary that you can share with your colleagues.

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