Apostrophe Error

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Morley
Posts: 24
Joined: Thu Feb 03, 2011 8:44 pm

Apostrophe Error

Post by Morley »

We have discovered over the past while that the spell checker constantly highlights words as incorrect that have apostrophes.

He's, Isn't etc. and words showing possessives always show as a spelling error with a correction suggestion with a different style apostrophe that is supposed to be correct.

We have tried everything we can think of to correct this problem but the spellchecker still wants to show them all as incorrect.

Any ideas?
ak47wong
Posts: 703
Joined: Tue Aug 12, 2003 9:37 am
Location: Sydney, Australia

Post by ak47wong »

When you say the spelling checker highlights words as incorrect that have apostrophes, are you referring to typographic, or curly, apostrophes? And when you say the corrected word has a different style apostrophe, are you referring to a typewriter, or straight, apostrophe (')?

It seems the TextPad spelling checker can't handle typographic apostrophes or quotation marks ("smart quotes"). One workaround is to add a list of contractions to the dictionary, like so:
  1. Construct a list of contractions using typographic apostrophes, e.g. starting from something like this.
  2. Save the list to a text file.
  3. In TextPad, click Configure > Preferences > Spelling.
  4. Click Edit.
  5. Click Import.
  6. Select the file you created in Step 2.
Unfortunately, possessives formed with 's will still be flagged as misspellings.
Morley
Posts: 24
Joined: Thu Feb 03, 2011 8:44 pm

Post by Morley »

The apostrophe brought in is usually a curly one and the spell checker takes the entire word and shows it as incorrect with a suggestion to change it to the same word with a straight apostrophe. This might not be too bad if it weren't for the fact that it leaves a space before the replaced apostrophe and we have to backspace it out. Most of the time we simply skip the word and have found ourselves with spelling errors our proofreaders have to get annoyed with.

Once again we find the strange situation where TextPad has a very good in-line spell checker with this BBS but for over 15 years I have asked for the same thing in their word processor. They stubbornly refuse with no explanation. If I did not know better I would say the operation was run in the background by Adobe. :roll: If it were not so good in so many other ways we would have changed years ago.

I might try looking back into old versions of TextPad and see if I can impose their old spellcheckers. Might work.
Morley
Posts: 24
Joined: Thu Feb 03, 2011 8:44 pm

Post by Morley »

Just to keep others up to date on this issue I received the following response on Dec 17, 2014

Hi Morley,

Thanks for reporting this behaviour. It is a bug and it will be fixed in the next upgrade, so until then your current work around will have to suffice.
Morley
Posts: 24
Joined: Thu Feb 03, 2011 8:44 pm

Post by Morley »

The newest release (7.5.1) has corrected this problem. Many thanks from all in this office.
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