I am editing a book about radio for one of my clients, and it contains a lot of technical terms which are apparently unfamiliar to the spell-checker of Open Office, the program I’m using for editing.
So I went through this 200-page document going to each word or phrase underlined in red, right-clicking, and selecting “ignore all.” When I was finally done, I saved it and exited.
Then today I opened it again, and all the underlines were back. Thinking that perhaps I hadn’t saved it the last time, I went through and did it again. Closed it, opened it back up, and they were back.
There is another right-click option, “set language --> none (do not check spelling)”,
but that still leaves the red underlines.
He is going to self-publish, and I sure don’t want it to print out that way! What can I do?
The red underlines won’t print, I wouldn’t worry about that.
Apparently, if you use ‘ignore’ it must only ignore the misspelling for that session. My suggestion, then, would to first be absolutely, 100% SURE the word is spelled correctly (maybe even googling it first) and then right click and hit ‘add to dictionary’. I think that’s what you really want to do.
If it’s just simple text and basic formatting, you might have better luck editing it in Google Docs. Google’s spell checker uses fancy AI magic to learn new words that enter the English vocabulary, and is especially great at identifying things like proper nouns that normal spell checkers wouldn’t understand. Kinda like the “Did you mean _______?” feature of its search. In my experience it’s by far the best spell checker.
It is smart enough to know, for example, that in “De Forest told me to see de forest”, only the second “de” is wrong.
This, you CAN import larger dictionaries, or create your own in open office. I use open office for a lot of things (it was a hella learning curve for database tables and interfaces but I can do simple ones) since its open source freeware, totally customizable since it is a modular program