Correct way to exclude names in spellchecker

English
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#1

Hi!

What is the proper way to exclude names from being spellchecked every time? I am aware of the method of marking every occurrence of a name in the text and setting “language” to “none”. This is a manual and tedious process though.

Adding the names to the dictionary doesn’t seem the right solution, since they are not words and also I don’t want to have the names of people I write about in my dictionary file. Using “ignore all” seems to only work until I close the document and then I get asked the same question on every spellcheck anew.

Any ideas? How do you do it?

Thanks!

#2

Afaik - there is no other way than to add to your dictionary. If you have any concerns related to privacy and/or security, assure that you (resp. your account) are the only one havimng permissions to read or modify the standard.dic. This needs to be done on the OS level.

#3

… setting “language” to “none” … is … tedious

It is not so tedious if you create a dedicated character style and assign a keyboard shortcut to it.

names … are not words

Eh, what?!

I don’t want to have the names of people I write about in my dictionary file.

Then you have two mutually contradictory wishes. Thus, what is the point of asking?

#4

Thanks for both answers!

@anon73440385: I feared that this would be the case…

@gabix: Why I say that I don’t want the names in the system dictionary: As I use libreoffice for work and have to keep my clients confidential (unlike normal words), I would prefer not to save them in the default dictionary. What I had hoped for was that maybe it would be possible that libreoffice stores the ignored words (from the spellcheck) in the document itself.

The keyboard shortcuts make things easier, but nevertheless I have to do this every single time for every name, unlike e.g. “ignore all”.

Hope my question is a bit clearer now.

#5

would prefer not to save them in the default dictionary.

Your own entries into a dictionary do not go to the default dictionary, but into a dictionary located in your user profile directory - just to make that fact clear, since my gut feeling tells me, that you have the idea everyone was able to see any entry you made into that dictionary. That’s the background of my advice, to set proper permissions. In that sense I agree with @gabix. since if you write names into documents, then there are two places .- the document and the dictionary on both depend an the security setting of your perseonal storage / directories.

1 Like
#6

Hi,
Just bumping up this topic as I find it quite annoying and quite illogical:

If technically possible, names should not be spell checked!

It is strange to ask users to add names to their dictionary, wherever this dictionaries are stored. Can one find any names in the physical, paper based dictionary (except maybe very notable persons)?

One can have an English document containing names from any country, so it shouldn’t be even tried to have “all known” names defined in the speller.
It would better to simply detect when a word starts with capital letter and is in the middle of sentence, or similar.

Obviously all of the above are imho.

Best regards!

#7

Sadly not all Languages are written only with Letters in lower Case. So this simple Approach would be sufficient for the english Language, where we also don’t need Umlauts, Accents and therefore could skip also Unicode-Letters.

(I used the Writing of my Language to illustrate the Problem for some international Users. And there are bigger Problems for other Languages waiting.)

2 Likes
#15

Hi all, bumping this up as I am searching to see if this has been solved:

Can the names of all the countries that use a certain language be injected into the default spell check? For libreoffice instead that each individual having to add them to their local dictionary?

It is the opposite question from above but I feel it will solve the OP’s privacy concerns and address the rules that exist for different languages?

For example English (UK) could have the names from the UK national statistics. And Spanish (Mexico) could have the names from the Mexican national statistics database . And have them both check once a year for updates?

#9

The spellcheck isn’t there to check every known word. It uses a dictionary of commonly used words but if you compare the list to, say the Oxford English Dictionary, there will be far fewer.

I don’t have a particularly unusual first name but on a virgin install of Word, Thunderbird or LibreOffice it gets an underline and the offer of another word, often alligator. Does it worry me at all? No, I can add my and others names if I need to. These additions in the standard.dic survive between upgrades so it is a one time addition for each name.

What would worry me is that if there were so many different proper names that the spell checker couldn’t pick up misspellings of common words. This would be a likely unintended consequence of your proposal, especially now when people vary the spellings of their children’s names in an attempt to create unique names.

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#10

Do you volunteer? Everybody can create and publish dictionaries and there is a site for extensions.
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But I don’t think this helps. Consider a norther german variant of the english George: Björn, Jörg and Jörn among others. Two are quite common the third could be a typo or not. The only way to decide this is having access to my address-book on my computer…

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#14

Yes I would volunteer for a couple of languages and maybe one sub language.

So what about if a name is only chosen if it has been used 100 times? Would that help avoid unique names?

About similar spellings for the same word that seems like already done with more common names like Jeff, Geoff, …

#16

No general solution. Compare another current question, linked below. A scanned or imported document can have the same “typo” repeatedly. Typical problems in scans can be ligatures, especially for smaller fonts.
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Other documents are shorter. Usual letters have my name twice: In header and signature, so my name is still a typo unless marked or added to my dictionary.
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The other problem is: You need to change the software/coding too, because you have to scan for words first, then spell-check. Now it is a quicker single pass processing. This would not matter while I type text, but for importing text like scan or vopy/paste it is a considerable topic.
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#12

Please don’t use the “suggest solution” button to continue a conversation. Use the little speech bubble below a comment instead. (Background: Answers can be moved around, while comments stay in timely order.)

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#13

Sorry! Drew myself to the big button. I will see if I can fix it.

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