Checking Spelling

This tutorial will illustrate checking spelling in Dreamvweaver CS5.

Once you have some text on a page you should check the spelling before you show it to the wider world. As part of a professionally presented web site, correct spelling is absolutely essential.

Let's check the spelling on the page about Sydney.

To start the spelling checker, select the Commands menu and then Check Spelling.

By the way, and as you can see from the Commands menu, there is a keyboard shortcut to start the spelling check and it's Shift+F7. For any command that is available via a menu any keyboard shortcut is shown on the menu next to the command. (If there isn't a keyboard shortcut shown you know how to set one up now anyway, don't you?)

Once you've selected Check Spelling, the Check Spelling dialog appears.

The spelling checker works its way through the document and flags any words that it does not recognise in the Word not found in dictionary box. In this case it's found the rather unusual word Sydneysiders, a term used for people who live in Sydney.

When the spelling checker finds a word it does not recognise, it makes suggestions about what the word should actually be. These suggestions are in the scrolling list.

If the word is actually correct - which it is in this case - what I actually need to do is to add it to my personal dictionary, which the Dreamweaver spelling checker also checks for any unknown words. Once I tell it to put Sydneysiders in my personal dictionary, it won't ask me about it again.

So, in this case, I press the Add to Personal button.

Once I've done that, the spelling checker find the next word it doesn't recognise.

The word in this case is baches. If I'm not sure what the word is supposed to be, I can look at it in my document as Dreamweaver highlights each word as it finds it. If the Check Spelling dialog is in the way, drag it to another location.

Looking at the location and context of the word, it's clear that it is supposed to be beaches, so I select this from the suggestions that have been offered (it's the fourth one down) and click the Change button. If I suspect that I have made the same mistake elsewhere in the document, I can press Change All instead.

The next unrecognized word is km, which is the abbreviation for kilometers. Here I can choose what to do. The word kilometers isn't in the list of suggestions, but I could type it into the Change To box myself and then press Change (or Change All). I could add km to my personal dictionary as I use it a lot. Or I could decide that I'm really not bothered about this abbreviation and just press Ignore All.

Continuing in this fashion I eventually reach the end of the spelling check and see this message.

This tells me that the spell check is complete.

Before you actually do a spelling check, make sure that you have your preferences set correctly. Check the General page on Preferences (you know how to find that by now, don't you?) and make sure that the appropriate dictionary for the language you are using is selected.

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