Spell check sources

Question

Where does Paratext get ‘approved’ spellings from? It seems that PT is not restricted to just the entries in the Wordlist. Even in projects where no spellings have been approved, Paratext is only marking some words as incorrect when ‘Display Spelling’ is turned on and it does so more or less correctly. So where does Paratext get the information from?

Thanks,
anon015155

Answer 1

anon015155,

It is an intentional feature of Paratext not to underline all the words in a text with the red wavy lines. It makes the text hard to read. Every project starts out with all words having unknown/incorrect spelling status, so it is not helpful to mark every single word. I had seen this little fact in Help somewhere but could not find it to direct you there. If you use the spell checking tools to maximum advantage, then Paratext learns more and more about correct spelling in your language and uses to the red and grey squiggle underlines to point out to you words that are probably not spelled correctly. Until you begin marking works as correct or incorrect, Paratext does not have any information on which to analyze your language.While it is true that eventually you will have to mark all words as either correct or incorrect, Paratext tries to help you find your mistakes. The Paratext website has a document with the recommended path for checking spelling on projects that are just getting with spell checking.
http://paratext.org/system/files/Paratext7.1WordlistSpellCheckingManual-v1.0.pdf

The above document gives an overview of spell checking add an effective order for applying the various tools. We have some videos that show most of these tools being used.

Comments

Thanks guys! Very helpful.

Answer 2

The Spell Check tool uses statistical analysis to determine if words are likely to be misspelled. For example, if you have a word that only differs from another word by one character and one word is used a lot and one is only used once, it can be fairly certain that the used-once word is incorrect. Note that is has several “rules” for determining if a given word might be incorrect - You can see the rules by going to the WordList and hovering over the Tools > Spell Check menu item.

As you mark words correct/incorrect in the WordList or add more text to the project so that it has more information, it should get better at determining which words are misspelled.