Wishes
Post your wishes about Graphisoft products: Archicad, BIMx, BIMcloud, and DDScad.

Spell checker that works with CAPITALS

Paul King
Advisor
Spell checker needs to work with notes that are in capital letters. Currently, ArchiCAD assumes any word that is all caps = some kind of acronym.

Many practices use only capiltal letters in all annotation , so this is quite important!
PAUL KING | https://www.prime.net.nz
ArchiCAD 8-27 | Twinmotion 2023
Windoze 11 PC | Intel Core i9 10900K | Nvidia Gforce RTX 3080 | 32 Gb DDR3 | 2x4K monitor extended desktop
9 REPLIES 9
Dwight
Newcomer
I am happy to support your wish with a positive vote, but
without starting an argument, the practice of using ALL CAPS in drawing lettering is obsolete.

It is merely a sentimental hold-over from block letter hand-lettering days.

Practices not exploring the typographic possibilities of a proper readable upper and lower case font - as easy as Helvetica/Arial Bold - are missing a chance to improve drawing communication.

I came to this opinion in 1980 when i worked for a firm of British architects in Victoria, Canada.

Their best guy hand-lettered large sized upper and lower cased letters and it was great! I am glad to bring this feature to my modern drawing with the help of computing.
Dwight Atkinson
Karl Ottenstein
Moderator
Paul - and others -

Please do not edit the poll options that are automatically created when you create a new wish. All 5 voting options have to be available for the wish to be treated legitimately when processed by GS. Deleting all but "Essential / Important" to skew the results just means that the wish will be ignored.

I've added the other options back...

Cheers,
Karl / Moderator
One of the forum moderators
AC 27 USA and earlier   •   macOS Ventura 13.6.6, MacBook Pro M2 Max 12CPU/30GPU cores, 32GB
Karl Ottenstein
Moderator
Paul,

I've looked at this issue and there is apparently something amiss on your system, perhaps related to Vista 64 and/or your version of Microsoft Word.

In the Help file, it states that on Windows systems, it is the Microsoft Word spell checker which does the work. ArchiCAD does not filter upper case strings, etc.

Upper case words are checked on my XP Pro (32) system with Word 2002 installed. So, I'm voting 'not needed'.

To the people who voted 'essential' or 'important': is checking upper case a verified problem for you - if so describe your system - or, did you vote based on the assumption that upper case strings are not spell-checked?

I had thought that the Word checking Preferences determined how the spell checking worked. But, on my system if I go to the Spelling and Grammar tab inside Word and check or clear the checkbox for ignoring upper case words, upper case is still always checked in AC 11.

The spell checker technology is overdue for some improvements anyway - as it has not changed since it was introduced to AC. I notice that even thought I set the AC spell check preferences for 'current story' only, that it still checks all layouts, etc. They need ot provide better control over what is spell-checked - and better document how Windows and Mac users control the spell checking engine (which is not provided by GS, but by Microsoft on Windows).

Cheers,
Karl
One of the forum moderators
AC 27 USA and earlier   •   macOS Ventura 13.6.6, MacBook Pro M2 Max 12CPU/30GPU cores, 32GB
I would vote essential for the spell checker to work without needing the M$ Office software installed.
Now on Windows we need to have M$ Office which I do not need at all - Open Office suits me...

Best Regards,
Piotr
Karl Ottenstein
Moderator
Piotr wrote:
I would vote essential for the spell checker to work without needing the M$ Office software installed.
Now on Windows we need to have M$ Office which I do not need at all - Open Office suits me...

Best Regards,
Piotr
Please don't confuse this poll with that wish, Piotr! I agree with you - but make it a separate wish, please.

Cheers,
Karl
One of the forum moderators
AC 27 USA and earlier   •   macOS Ventura 13.6.6, MacBook Pro M2 Max 12CPU/30GPU cores, 32GB
Thomas Holm
Booster
Karl wrote:
Upper case words are checked on my XP Pro (32) system with Word 2002 installed. So, I'm voting 'not needed'.
I find it a much worse problem that in the Archicad SWE/Mac version, I seem not to be able to switch the Spell checker to Swedish, despite that this language is available in the system's spell checking. What's up?
AC4.1-AC26SWE; MacOS13.5.1; MP5,1+MBP16,1
Paul King
Advisor
Karl wrote:
... go to the Spelling and Grammar tab inside Word and check or clear the checkbox for ignoring upper case words...
You sir are a genius! - This has been a problem that baffled me and every user I know for years! including my reseller & this forum - e.g. http://archicad-talk.graphisoft.com/viewtopic.php?p=96900&highlight=spell+checker#96900

So simple & obvious once it is pointed out.

If nothing else, the Help file should be updated to cover this issue.
PAUL KING | https://www.prime.net.nz
ArchiCAD 8-27 | Twinmotion 2023
Windoze 11 PC | Intel Core i9 10900K | Nvidia Gforce RTX 3080 | 32 Gb DDR3 | 2x4K monitor extended desktop
Paul King
Advisor
Dwight wrote:
I am happy to support your wish with a positive vote, but
without starting an argument, the practice of using ALL CAPS in drawing lettering is obsolete.


Hi Dwight - you are quite right - and there have been empirical studies done proving that using upper & slower case rather than all caps improves communication . Unfortunately, I don't get to make that call with a lot of practices I work for.

Even when I do use mixed case lettering however, I tend to make headings & room names all caps to differentiate them - and they are just as likely to be mis spelled. However, problem solved - see Karl's post
PAUL KING | https://www.prime.net.nz
ArchiCAD 8-27 | Twinmotion 2023
Windoze 11 PC | Intel Core i9 10900K | Nvidia Gforce RTX 3080 | 32 Gb DDR3 | 2x4K monitor extended desktop
Karl Ottenstein
Moderator
Glad that you got things to work, Paul! 🙂

I agree that there's room for a lot of improvement in documentation and more!

Cheers,
Karl
One of the forum moderators
AC 27 USA and earlier   •   macOS Ventura 13.6.6, MacBook Pro M2 Max 12CPU/30GPU cores, 32GB