* Spell-Check

[goodwin2]

Is there any update on whether or if FH will have an auto spell check? Sure would be handy.

[ColeValleyGirl]

You'd have to ask Calico Pie about the spell checking solution -- in the meantime Spell checking solution? (15729) might be of interest.

[mjashby]

Personally, I see very limited value in incorporating a comprehensive Spell Check facility or, worse still, Grammar Check, in Family Historian, i.e. there are simply too many variant spellings (or miss-spellings) and colloquial terms in sources to manage when transcribing information accurately, i.e. strictly as they were actually written at the time rather than 'correcting' the text to some 'modern' and often unexplained interpretation of what one might believe was meant. There would also be a significant risk of a constant spell-check battle between traditional UK English spellings, other variants of the English language; and other languages, which would be more irritating than helpful to the user. It should also be borne in mind that spell-checking can produce a significant performance hit in data management.

My own approach, when I wish to incorporate a lengthy piece of spell-checked text is to prepare that text in a text processor that has its own spell-check facility, which can therefore cope with whatever language variant I wish to use; and then copy-paste the completed and checked text in to Family Historian. I find this approach much more reliable as it uses tools that are specifically designed for text processing which doesn't restrict the user to the 'single language' approach that some inbuilt spell-checking facility would normally expect.

Mervyn

[tatewise]

Certainly, adding spell-checking to FH would need careful design, but many other genealogy products do so.

An advantage of spell-checking being built-in to FH is that it could automatically incorporate Individual Names, Place names, and Address names into the Dictionary, which would also allow users to add new words.

There would need to be options to enable/disable spell-checking on certain fields such as Notes and Text From Source for the reasons suggested by Mervyn.

Ideally it should cater for a variety of languages and be able to associate different languages to different sections of text (as other products do). This might even cater for the problem of past dialects of language in transcripts such as Text From Source.