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I am not a big user of spell checking. I usually keep it turned off, and spell check by eye. But today I am correcting OCR and I decided to turn it on. I am really puzzled by some of the behavior.

Since there are a lot of names in the text, I decided to have it "learn" some of them using the <option-command-L> key short cut. This works fine. Then I turned the computer off, and went to bed. This morning it is flagging many (but not all!) of these names again. Isn't "learning" supposed to be permanent? (Well in computers at least. I understand about humans )

And then — I am using American English — it flags words like recognized. For this it gives me the options: recognizer, recognizes, recognize. And then just a few words later it flags recognize! And it gives me the options recognized, recognizer, recognizes!

A lot of this behavior comes down to the spellchecker you're using. Apple provides some default system spellcheckers, but one can install a variety of dictionaries.

phspaelti wrote:Since there are a lot of names in the text, I decided to have it "learn" some of them using the <option-command-L> key short cut. This works fine. Then I turned the computer off, and went to bed. This morning it is flagging many (but not all!) of these names again. Isn't "learning" supposed to be permanent? (Well in computers at least. I understand about humans )

Learning a particular word/name should indeed be permanent, even across relaunching and restarts. OSX saves these learned words to a file at "~/Library/Spelling". It used to be a plain text file with control characters used as delimiters (maybe the NULL character?), but I think Apple changed the format at some point. You might check there and see what the files look like. At least one should contain the list of words you've tried to teach your dictionary.

And then — I am using American English — it flags words like recognized. For this it gives me the options: recognizer, recognizes, recognize. And then just a few words later it flags recognize! And it gives me the options recognized, recognizer, recognizes!

One thing to make sure of is that you have your spelling dictionaries configured properly in your NWP language preferences. Maybe you have an old or low quality dictionary selected? Perhaps that's unlikely, but I'm not sure how else to reconcile the odd suggestions you're seeing. NWP itself isn't involved in coming up with spelling correction/suggestions, so it'd be something you'd need to fix with the dictionaries.

Thank you, Martin, for the feedback.

I am really not that concerned about this. I am glad to hear that it is not really a Nisus problem. The not remembering problem seems to have solved itself. Maybe there was something about the way I shut the computer down that cause the remembered words to go missing.

As for the other problem, here is a picture. It really can't be anything about the dictionary, can it? One striking fact about the cases that it's flagging is that they are all instances where English (U.S) and English (British) are different. (So "laborer" is another word that gets flagged.) It' s as if it is using the British dictionary to spell check but then using the American dictionary for the suggestions.