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MS Office Forum / Word / Spelling and Grammar / November 2006Stubbornly ignoring misspellings
Hi, Although I have very carefully followed the very clear instructions from the MVP site http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/General/ExcludeWordFromDic.htm, I cannot get Word 03 to recognize as spelling errors, for instance, Noel in French (which should spell Noël). I have made sure the exception file is in plain text, one word misspelled per line and that it is saved under the name MSSP3FR.EXC in the same directory as my custom.dic file. I have further made sure I have only one custom.dic file on my disk and that this file, of course, does not contain the mispelled words. I have also made sure the custom.dic file is correctly checked as the custom dictionary. What next can I do? Any help will be greatly appreciated. Regards  SignatureJohn Doue > Hi, > [quoted text clipped - 15 lines] > > Regards Sorry for answering my own post but I found a way around the problem by creating a subdirectory to \proof and moving the custom.dic and mssp3fr.exc there. For some reason, this works BUT I realize I have a secondary problem: since words must be written in lower case letters, the dictionary now does flag the error but proposes only "noël" in lower case, which in fact would replace a spelling error by another error. Is there anyway to solve this? Best regards. SignatureJohn Doue Hi John, The problem is that "noël" is also a valid common noun in French. It can refer to a song sung around Christmas time, or to a gift (the Petit Robert gives this example, for instance: "donner aux enfants leurs petits noëls"). This explains why "noël" in lower case is in the speller lexicon. So you are not replacing an error by another error, in fact. There is simply a coincidence between two words, one which, in a given sense, should always be capitalized, and another, common noun that is not capitalized. It's not different from the pair pierre (=stone)-Pierre (first name). You could have the same in English if you wrote "James bond" where "bond" would not be squiggled by the regular spell-checker because the word also exists in English as a regular noun. This being said, I agree with you that Noel without the accent is not a very frequent first name in French and it would probably be better to only include the upper-case with the diacritic. We'll definitely think about this for the next version. Thanks for your feedback, Thierry Thierry Fontenelle [MSFT] Microsoft Natural Language Group > > Hi, > > [quoted text clipped - 25 lines] > > Best regards. Well explained. I would just say that I would put both versions in an exclusion file. It's better to be challenged at either occurrence, and then 'ignore', than to let a wrong one through. I have done this with 'abut' and 'exited' and 'excited' as well as 'dinning' which is a very rare word meaning to make a din, whereas it is much lore likely you will mistype 'dining'! N'est pas? > Hi John, > [quoted text clipped - 60 lines] >> >> Best regards. Thanks for the suggestion, Aalaan. It's always a trade-off, of course. Deciding to include a word or not is never an easy task (if we were to remove "noël" from the French lexicon, I'm pretty sure we'd also get messages from users who would wonder why we don't recognize it in lower case "since all standard dictionaries include it". Your mention of "exited", etc is interesting. We can only hope that this problem will be less serious in the future now that we are introducing a contextual speller in Office 2007. So if you write something like "I'm exited about this", we now squiggle "exited" and suggest "excited", even though "exited" is still in the lexicon of the traditional spell-checker and is correct in other contexts. See http://blogs.msdn.com/naturallanguage/archive/2006/06/19/637359.aspx o http://blogs.msdn.com/correcteurorthographiqueoffice/archive/2006/06/05/617653.aspx for more information about this new feature... Thierry Thierry Fontenelle [MSFT] Microsoft Natural Language Group > Well explained. I would just say that I would put both versions in an > exclusion file. It's better to be challenged at either occurrence, and then [quoted text clipped - 67 lines] > >> > >> Best regards. Thanks for such a quick reply. I didn't realise you actually worked at Microsoft. I wouldn't dare to suggest messing with your lexicon. I think it's up to the user to create exclusion dictionaries as required, and they were the entries I found necessary. However, I definitely have issues with the spell and grammar checking in other areas, which range from plain wrong to misleading, but as they are on Word 2000 I wouldn't trouble you with them. Wonderful program by the way. Friday arvo here in Australia so I'm 'excited' about 'exiting' to a glass of cool beverage. No more editing today! Almost as Boozy as Paris was... Thanks again. > Thanks for the suggestion, Aalaan. It's always a trade-off, of course. > Deciding to include a word or not is never an easy task (if we were to [quoted text clipped - 106 lines] >> >> >> >> Best regards. > Thanks for such a quick reply. I didn't realise you actually worked at > Microsoft. I wouldn't dare to suggest messing with your lexicon. I think [quoted text clipped - 118 lines] >>>>> >>>>> Best regards. Aalan and Thierry, thanks about these commments, I had not realized that "noël" was acceptable in a certain meaning in French. My client did not take it this way and might lack sense of humor. He must be using a different speller than MS Word's since he detected the lack of "ë" in Noël, a mistake which had survived several layers of checking. As far as Aalan suggestion is concerned, AFAIK, it is not possible to include any capital case spelling in the exclusion file. This is very clearly spelled out (pun intended) in the exclusing instructions. And yes, Thierry, it would be nice if MS would look into such cases but however good the spell-checking will be, it will not detect a mistake I caught at the very last minute in a document I was about to email to the same client. Since I know Thierry's French is excellent (of course), here it is (was): "Ce trimestre, la croissance devrait être triée par ..." How could possibly Word detect I intended to type "tirée" ... Fortunately, I caught it in time ... Life is tough! Regards SignatureJohn Doue Well John, it's just a fact of life. Here we subject every book to at least five stages of careful checking after an e-edit. But almost invariably there are still errors only picked up at the fifth stage, and worse -- when the book is finally on the bookshop shelves, a quick dive in usually reveals one more error that's been entirely missed! And the trouble is, the author has done the same thing and found the same error. Sigh. But never mind, at least we caught the other 764. > Aalan and Thierry, thanks about these commments, I had not realized that > "noël" was acceptable in a certain meaning in French. My client did not [quoted text clipped - 16 lines] > > Regards |
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