Introduction
All of the options that appear on the Spell check tab of the Pro tool are described below.
topWhat to check
By default certain types of words are not spell checked. This includes words that are all upper case (e.g. NASA), words that are mixed case (e.g. SpellCheck), words that contain digits (e.g. Homer6), words surrounded by characters other than quote marks (e.g. <table>), and words within <samp>, <code>, and <kbd> tags. Use the 'UPPER CASE words', 'MixeD CaSe words', and so on, options to include these types of words in the spell checking.
Words within attributes are also not normally checked. However you can use the 'Include attributes' option to spell check text within displayable attributes such as : alt, title, summary, label, prompt, and standby.
By default if the web page has a language specified and this language is not compatible with the language chosen for spell checking, then a warning is added to the page and the spell check skipped. But with the 'Ignore web page language' option you can force the spell check to proceed whatever the language of the web page. For reference:
- American or British spell check runs when web page language set to 'en' or 'eng'
- French spell check runs when web page language set to 'fr', 'fre', or 'fra'
- Italian spell check runs when web page language set to 'it' or 'ita'
- Spanish spell check runs when web page language set to 'es', 'esl', or 'spa'
- German spell check runs when web page language set to 'de', 'deu', or 'ger'
Extra/Own dictionary
Use this option to enter the path to a file containing a list of your own words to supplement the standard dictionaries or to replace them.
If you select a language from the Spell check option then the dictionary you supply will be used in addition to the standard dictionary for the selected language.
If you select 'Own dictionary' from the the Spell check option, then any dictionary you specify will be the only one used for performing the spell check.
In this way you could check against a language not currently supported, or simply add your own set of industry specific words for the area your website covers.
Your dictionary file must be a plain text file consisting of one word per line, with no duplicates, and must be saved using UTF-8 encoding.
Suggestions
When a word is not found in the dictionary a list of suggestions is normally presented. But with the 'Ignore suggestions' option you can suppress this list.
Misspelt words
To allow you to quickly create your own dictionary of additional words the 'Save misspelt words' option will save all of the words not found by the spell checker into a separate file. This text file may then be edited and used as an extra dictionary.
Note that this file is reused each time you run a validation with this option and the result after each validation will be a sorted list of words with no duplicates. So you may wish to use a copy of this file as the extra dictionary. A file is created and used for each language and has the same name as the dictionary used for testing. It may be found within the 'dicts' subfolder next to the place where results pages are saved. For example: 'My Documents\TotalValidatorTool\dicts\ukenglish.dic.new'. Note that this file is saved using UTF-8 encoding.
Ignoring items
Sometimes you may have whole pages, large areas of text, or even just individual words or phrases that you don't wish to spell check. You can achieve this by adding special instructions to your pages to tell the Total Validator to skip these special areas of text.