🚀 go-pugleaf

In a meeting with our user base today, many complaints about InDesign's spellchecker came out. Specifically, since we can't ignore "capitalization errors" or punctuation ("word/word" will return as a spelling error because InDesign won't ignore the "/" between the words, but Quark does)... and because it takes so many clicks to add a word to the dictionary and because it seems brain dead in finding errors (a word with transposed letters won't be caught, but with an extra letter inserted it will be)...

Well, all of this got me to wondering, "Can we just bypass InDesign's spellcheck and use the one that's built into OS X?" I just ran some preliminary tests in TextEdit, and it works SO much better than the InDesign one that I would love to just be able to put a script in the scripts palette that uses the OS X spellchecker. This seems VERY doable to me, but I'm not certain of how to begin on the project. It can't copy all of the text into TextEdit, run the spellcheck, apply the corrections and re-paste the text back into InDesign... because then we'll lose text positioning, formatting, leading will probably shift, fonts could change, etc, etc, etc.... But, might it not be possible to have OS X look at the text in a box and apply at an Apple Event level the built in spell check for the OS?

Any thoughts? Anyone try this yet? Does it sound like it could even be done? Many thanks to those who wish to help tackle this problem...

Christopher