Everything Goes in Ukrainian
James Wamser, from Sells Printing in Wisconsin, sent us a great tip recently. A client was frustrated because someone had accidentally typed the word “emplyee” in an InDesign document and InDesign’s spelling-check feature didn’t flag it as incorrect. After all, that can’t be a real word, right?
Well, not in English. However, James (who is quite good at this kind of sleuthing) pulled the document apart until he found the answer: Somehow all the text in the document had been set to the Ukrainian language.
While I don’t speak Ukrainian (though one or more of my grandparents may have), I do know something curious about how this language acts in InDesign. Specifically: Every word you can type appears to spell-check properly. That’s an amazing feat for a language — even über-flexible Esperanto can’t pull that off.
The problem, you see, is that Adobe either forgot to include a Ukrainian dictionary in CS3 or they couldn’t find one to stick in the box. A quick glance at the Dictionary pane of the Preferences dialog box uncovers the error:
ukranian
Notice how Spelling is set to [No Vendor]? No vendor, no spelling. So “emplyee” looks jes’ fine to me!
None of the other languages are so lucky. I’m at a loss as to how to turn this problem into an opportunity (besides an April Fools’ joke on a colleague). But it is worth noting as Potential Quicksand #47: What to check when spell checking stops checking!
This is just too funny, David. Yes, it has great potential for April 1!
It even doesn’t spellcheck “Ukranian” instead of “Ukra_i_nian”
Alexander: LOL! Now, I just need a spell-checker in this blog.
Thanks for pointing that out. I have fixed the misspellings above.
Once I had a document where the auto-correct feature was turned on and set to Hungarian. I opened the file and the whole thing was in Hungarian! I think it was a keyboard shortcut turned awry.
Spellchecks can be funny. There’s one “easter egg” hidden in InDesign’s Czech dictionary.
Change your dictionary and language to Czech. Set hyphenation to Winsoft and spelling to proximity.
Now it’s time to learn a new Czech word - “št?stí” - which means happines or luck.
Create a narrow text frame and type in a sentence containg this word (sometimes you have to type it twice).
Watch InDesign crash, while conteplating the real meaning of happines and luck.
Hodn? št?stí! (Good luck!)
not to go off on a tangent, but Jan’s post reminded me of that weird thing in Quark (4 or 5) where you type cmd+shift+esc (or something similar) and the little alien comes out and blasts your document. I wasn’t hallucinating, i promise.
It was the killer space alien delete.
Cmd+Opt+shift+K
^ maybe i’ll submit that to the Indesign wishlist