How can I make spell check ignore optional hyphens?

[John P]

I am writing a technical document with many long, concatenated camelCase
words. I need to use optional hyphens (CTRL-), and the hyphenation occurs
with different breaks in different instances (e.g., SpaceComm-StartTime and
Space-CommStartTime). When I run spell chek, each of these gets flagged as a
different word, Is there any way to make spell check ignore optional hyphens
so that when I okay "SpaceCommStartTime" it will know that
"SpaceComm-StartTime" and "Space-CommStartTime" are okay too?

 

[grammatim]

You could put both varieties into your custom dictionary; or you could
put all the optional hyphens into the word each time it occurs (use
AutoCorrect/AutoFormat to make it easer).

 

[John P]

You could put both varieties into your custom dictionary; or you could
put all the optional hyphens into the word each time it occurs (use
AutoCorrect/AutoFormat to make it easer).



Thanks. That might help for a limited number of such word, but my document has hundreds of them, many with 5+ occurrences (each a different variation). I was hoping that Word would have an option to just ignore the hyphens in spell check.

 

[grammatim]

(Sorry, I don't use spellcheck, so I just looked in my open document
for the controls, and they've moved them somewhere. The document is
set to "do not check spelling or grammar" -- which apparently now
means you can't even _manually_ check a word or passage!)

 

[Mecalith]

The spell checker should treat the dashes as white space. If you make a
copy of your document and replace all the dashes with spaces, the spell check
will find the same spelling errors. You need to add the text fragments
(SpaceComm, StartTime, CommStartTime) to your dictionary.
||

 

[Thierry Fontenelle [MSFT]]

Mecalith is right. It is not because SpaceCommStartTime is in the speller
lexicon (or has been added to the custom dictionary) that the speller should
verify SpaceComm and StartTime on either side of the hyphen. If the speller
was doing that, it would also verify a string like infor-mation, which
everyone would consider incorrect (and which everyone will expect the speller
to flag).

Best wishes,

Thierry

Thierry Fontenelle [MSFT]
Microsoft Natural Language Group

 

[Avner]

Hi,
I'm having a similar problem while writing some java software documentation.
I was wondering whether there is an option to make ms-office's spell checker
ignore mixed case words like the Eclipse spell checker does?
An even better solution would be that the speller would know to treat
mixed-case words as separate words (or sub-words if you like), and search
each sub-word in the lexicon instead of searching for the joint word.
e.g SpaceCommStartTime would be treated as "Space Comm Start Time" during
spelling (but the document remains unchanged).

1. Is there a way to do it using built-in ms-office features?
2. Is there a way to write an office add-in that programmatically affects
the speller's behavior?

Avner

Mecalith is right. It is not because SpaceCommStartTime is in the speller
lexicon (or has been added to the custom dictionary) that the speller should
verify SpaceComm and StartTime on either side of the hyphen. If the speller
was doing that, it would also verify a string like infor-mation, which
everyone would consider incorrect (and which everyone will expect the speller
to flag).

Best wishes,

Thierry

Thierry Fontenelle [MSFT]
Microsoft Natural Language Group

The spell checker should treat the dashes as white space. If you make a
copy of your document and replace all the dashes with spaces, the spell check
will find the same spelling errors. You need to add the text fragments
(SpaceComm, StartTime, CommStartTime) to your dictionary.
||