Common spellcheck
Mac Tip #171/03-Nov-2004

Last week’s Tip had some information about Classic, Carbon and Cocoa applications.

Of these, Cocoa applications have been written to take full advantage of all that Mac OS X can offer.

So, for example, if you open up OS X’s TextEdit in your Applications folder and start typing you may well find that before long some dotted red underlines appear under some words.

This is Mac OS X’s built-in spellchecker at work.

What’s different about this is that in the old days each piece of software had its own spellcheck. If you taught a word to one program you’d then have to go ahead and teach that same word to any other programs you used.

Now Cocoa applications can all share the same dictionary — a blessing for those of us who live in parts of the world where placenames are unlikely to be in the dictionary.

If I teach TextEdit how to spell a few words, in my case I tried: Miraz, Paekakariki and Paraparaumu, then I can now type those same words without problem in Stickies, Mars Edit, Notebook, VooDooPad, Smultron, and a whole lot of others.

Oh, and if you see the red underline, hold down Control and click on the word to see what your choices are. To add a word to the dictionary choose Learn Spelling.