3 replies to this topic

[ChristopherDrum]

I've been looking for an alternative to InDesign's built-in spell checker. A user on the Adobe forums pointed me to Spell Catcher and I really love a lot about it. What would be really great would be to see Spell Catcher improve it's compatibility with InDesign. Specifically, I have tried running Spell Catcher on a block of formatted type, only to lose some of the formatting after Spell Catcher pasted in the corrected type. It would be wonderful to see Spell Catcher become application-aware with InDesign. It really seems most troublesome with character-level formatting. Anything that can be done to teach Spell Catcher how to play nicely with InDesign is more than welcome.

That would include the ability to select multiple text frames with the selection tool and have Spell Catcher understand that the frames contain valid, checkable text. Better yet, an application-aware menu item that checks all text on a given page would be OUTSTANDING. At worst, our business would just want Spell Checker to be applescriptable, so we could sort of simulate this process ourselves. As it stands, we have dozens and dozens of little text frames on a page, and for us to use Spell Catcher in our production workflow would mean to select all of the text of each individual frame, then hope it doesn't affect the formatting of the stylized text. Unfortunately, I can see this causing more problems than Spell Catcher would fix for us.

I know quite a number of InDesign users who would gladly shell out for Spell Catcher if it could claim tight integration with InDesign. In fact, our organization would probably buy about 25-30 copies immediately if that were the case. Perhaps a Spell Catcher plugin for InDesign?

[Evan Gross]

ChristopherDrum, on Sep 9 2003, 08:11 PM, said:

I've been looking for an alternative to InDesign's built-in spell checker. A user on the Adobe forums pointed me to Spell Catcher and I really love a lot about it. What would be really great would be to see Spell Catcher improve it's compatibility with InDesign. Specifically, I have tried running Spell Catcher on a block of formatted type, only to lose some of the formatting after Spell Catcher pasted in the corrected type. It would be wonderful to see Spell Catcher become application-aware with InDesign. It really seems most troublesome with character-level formatting. Anything that can be done to teach Spell Catcher how to play nicely with InDesign is more than welcome.

That would include the ability to select multiple text frames with the selection tool and have Spell Catcher understand that the frames contain valid, checkable text. Better yet, an application-aware menu item that checks all text on a given page would be OUTSTANDING. At worst, our business would just want Spell Checker to be applescriptable, so we could sort of simulate this process ourselves. As it stands, we have dozens and dozens of little text frames on a page, and for us to use Spell Catcher in our production workflow would mean to select all of the text of each individual frame, then hope it doesn't affect the formatting of the stylized text. Unfortunately, I can see this causing more problems than Spell Catcher would fix for us.

I know quite a number of InDesign users who would gladly shell out for Spell Catcher if it could claim tight integration with InDesign. In fact, our organization would probably buy about 25-30 copies immediately if that were the case. Perhaps a Spell Catcher plugin for InDesign?

I did take a good hard look at InDesign a while ago, there were some problems customers reported back on the C&G message board.

I did find a rather serious show-stopping problem with InDesign's RTF export at that time. I don't know whether they fixed it or not. I'll try to dig up the details - basically they were exporting to the clipboard and files incorrect/malformed RTF, at least w.r.t. certain characters and the encoding specified in the RTF did NOT MATCH the actual encoding of the RTF contents. It was pretty much impossible to deal with that kind of problem - sort of a GIGO (g=garbage, though really it wasn't that bad) situation.

But maybe things are better now, we reported this to Adobe and it really was a pretty serious thing, so perhaps they've fixed it.

AppleScriptablity will be coming, but probably not for a little while (only minimally in the 10.1 version). Doing a specific InDesign plug-in doesn't seem to make economic sense for us right at this point in time. We have our hands full as you can image, with Panther coming...

[ChristopherDrum]

Thanks for posting a response so quickly! Very good customer service.

With regards to InDesign's RTF issue. They're on version 2.0.2 right now, with version 3 right around the corner (most likely this Fall, given their product release calendars of the past). If I may humbly suggest, RTF might not necessarily be the best way to grab the text.

InDesign has the ability to export XML tagged text, which can retain formatting at the individual character level. Might it not be possible to have Spell Catcher grab tagged text when interfacing with InDesign, then reapplying those tags to the corrected text?

Obviously, the burden of InDesign's crappy spellchecker needn't fall on Spell Catcher's shoulders. However, it sounds at this point like Adobe isn't taking charge on the issue, and there are a TON of InDesign users who need this right now. Or, perhaps Adobe might be willing to provide plugin support for Spell Catcher themselves? They ship plugin support for some other products (Excel, for instance), so this could be a way for Adobe to get a quick solution to a known problem with InDesign and also generate traffic and revenue for Rainmaker.... Just thinking out loud here....

Thanks again for the quick response to my posting. I'm growing quickly addicted to running Spell Catcher on my system after only one day of use, I'm happy to report.

[paulc]

Unless Adobe is doing something way weird with XML, it should have no impact on formatting, especially character formatting. XML is SGML, and that is editorial markup, not formatting (fonts, sizes, etc.). Yes, within that technology there is a way to map "editorially" marked text to a style (i.e. level 1 head if 18 pt. Helvetica). But generally speaking, things like emphasized words a lot of time don't get editorial markup, thus XML won't know it's supposed to be bold, or italic, etc. The point is you can't count on it even though there is a way for it to be done.

RTF SHOULD be a better method because all it does is (supposedly) mimic exactly what text stylings are present/applied to raw text. Then again, RTF did come from the Redmond monopoly...