Hi, all.

Something that has been bugging me for a while ... time to ask the experts 
here! This issue is making spell checking more tedious for some larger 
documents ...

In my documents, I use the Chicago Manual of Style requirement for spaces next 
to em dashes in body text. Specifically, to *not* to use any spaces before or 
after the em dash (as they say, the dash is "set closed" rather than "set 
open").

I.e., it says that the usage should be "<sp>wordone---wordtwo<sp>" rather than 
"<sp>wordone<sp>---<sp>wordtwo<sp>" (where I am using "---" to represent the em 
dash, "<sp>" to represent a single space character, and making up word 
"wordone" and "wordtwo" for this contrived example).

However, when spell-checking in FM (FrameMaker 9, on Windows Vista and Windows 
7, fully patched), it finds occurrences of "wordone---wordtwo" as being spelled 
incorrectly. Even though "wordone" and "wordtwo" are both individually spelled 
correctly!

Yet, there are no such problems with "wordone<sp>---<sp>wordtwo". These are 
handled perfectly well!

I have not found (a) a way to prevent FM spell-checker from finding these uses, 
or (b) a way to make FM ignore them using the Find options.

Thus, my alternatives appear to be:

1. Insert a space before and after the em dash (Yuck! not a nice look! And the 
Chicago Manual of Style agrees with this !)

2. Insert a space before and after, and use an en dash instead of an em dash 
(make sure you note the "en"!). Btw, this is what Microsoft Word does 
automatically if you type "wordone"<space><dash><space>wordtwo<space>" ... it 
changes the <dash> to an <en dash>. This is not a bad alternative, but not as 
nice looking---the parenthetical aside is just not as clearly demarked!

3. Use parentheses for the asides. Not as nice looking ... although I do do 
this in a few places for other good reasons.

Any advice on how to handle this situation? What you all do for this?
 
Z

_______________________________________________


You are currently subscribed to framers as arch...@mail-archive.com.

Send list messages to fram...@lists.frameusers.com.

To unsubscribe send a blank email to
framers-unsubscr...@lists.frameusers.com
or visit 
http://lists.frameusers.com/mailman/options/framers/archive%40mail-archive.com

Send administrative questions to listad...@frameusers.com. Visit
http://www.frameusers.com/ for more resources and info.

Reply via email to