Dictionary Casing Rules

Casing rules for words in the spell check dictionary are designed to give you maximum control over whether the spell checker will flag as an error a word that has different casing than the word that you added to the spelling dictionary. If you are adding words to the dictionary (either by indicating that you "always" want to ignore the word during a spell check of the document or by using the Edit Custom Dictionaries dialog), you should understand the effects of adding a word that is or is not capitalized.

The casing rules are as follows:

•	If a word appears in the dictionary in all uppercase, the spell checker will accept only forms in the document which are all uppercase; all other forms will be flagged as errors.

•	If a word appears in the dictionary in mixed case, the spell checker will accept only either (a) exact case matches or (b) all uppercase forms; all other forms will be flagged as errors.

•	If a word appears in the dictionary in lowercase, the spell checker will treat any casing as correct.

•	If a word appears in the dictionary more than once, it is the last form of that word in the user dictionary file whose casing establishes the rules.

Examples

1. Suppose that the word "bac" is a technical term used in your research, and you are spell checking the following text and would like to add the word to your dictionary,

Finding the bac is difficult.

The spell checker would stop at bac, and you would indicate that you "always" want to ignore this word. The word would be added to general.spl (the spelling dictionary) in all lowercase letters. Since it is in lowercase, the third rule above would apply and the word would be recognized by the speller even if it is in all caps, capitalized or some other form of mixed case.

2. If you were spell checking the following text, the spell checker would stop a possible misspelling 3 times.

THIS IS ABOUT BAC

Bac Rule 1: Finding the bac is difficult.

The spell checker would first stop on "BAC" and (if you instructed it to do so) enter it into the dictionary (as uppercase); then on "Bac" and (if you instructed it to do so), it would replace "BAC" with "Bac," with the result that it would then accept all future occurrences of both "BAC" and "Bac"; then on "bac" (which, if added, would accept all forms).

Once a more inclusive form is included in the dictionary, you cannot change it to a less inclusive form except by editing the user dictionary through the Edit Custom Dictionary dialog (click Proof, Spell and then the Dictionary button) or by editing your primary user dictionary directly. (The default primary user dictionary is GENERAL.SPL.) If the word is in mixed case (e.g., "abCd") and the spell checker stopped on another form (e.g., "AbcD") and you elected to add it, the new mixed case form would replace the prior mixed case form in the dictionary.

3. If you add “MacKenzie” is in your spelling dictionary, then "Mackenzie" will be flagged as an error. If you subsequently add Mackenzie to your spelling dictionary, then "MacKenzie" will be flagged.