Spellcheck problems

Question

From this screenshot, you can see that lots of words still have grey underlines. But when I do Spellcheck Current Book…, it only shows me four unknown words. Can anyone tell me what’s happening?

Answer 1

After a project has done enough work in the Wordlist (more than 50% of words in the project have been marked correct), the spell check will display the gray underlines for words that are in the Wordlist with an Unknown status. For it to get a gray underline, the spell check engine is fairly certain (about 95%) that it is spelled correctly, but it’s not marked in the Wordlist as being correct. Usually these words are just words you need to view in the Wordlist and mark as correct.

Comments

So the philosophy is that Spellcheck Current Book… should only make you check the words PT thinks is likely to be wrong, and that you should use the Wordlist to check the others, right? (You could argue that you could use the Wordlist to check all the words, and that the Spellcheck function is not necessary.)

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Spell Check Current Book does the same checks that you can find in the wordlist tool under Tools–>Spell check. These checks look for words that are unusual in some way. Display Spelling status marks all words of incorrect and unknown status. In Help it talks of a three step strategy for spell checking a project that has not been spell checked 1) approve common words, 2) Check words that ParaTExt thinks might be wrong (i.e. Spell check current book or Wordlist–>tools-all spell checks), 3) Display spelling status.

Answer 2

Our teams have found looking through the wordlist for spelling mistakes to be quite ineffective. It is too easy to think that a word is spelled correctly when in fact, it is not - a diacritic is out of place, or it is an old spelling choice, for example. It is much better to use all the spell checking tools available in the wordlist tool to sort out the words and find mistakes.
A key use of the main wordlist tool is to correct all spelling mistakes that one inadvertently finds (such as corrections needing to be made that were found in the Biblical Terms Tool). It is key that ALL occurrences (no book or other filters) be corrected at the same time. Too often the teams correct single words and Section Title, footnotes, Book Titles (yes), and the glossary remain uncorrected.

Comments

I agree, for teams who are not experienced spellers it is good to wait until a few books are drafted then use the “All Checks” under the “Spell Checking” in the Wordlist tool. Not sure how this approach jibes with the current SIL and Seed Company base plans though.