The spelling checker cannot determine the one correct replacement for a misspelled word, nor can it guarantee it will find the correct replacement. People misspell words in many ways by, for example, dropping letters, adding letters, transposing letters, or using the wrong letters or simply out of ignorance of the correct spelling. Some of these errors may result in words that have several perfectly reasonable replacements. For example, the misspelling flas could be flag, flask, flash, etc. Because of such ambiguity, the suggest method locates several alternative words and ranks them in function of their similarity to the misspelled word. The suggest method produces the best results with longer words containing a single error.

Use the following options to tune the behavior of the suggestion and the auto correction methods.

Tuning suggestions and auto corrections

Maximum number of suggestions

This is the maximum number of suggestions that are listed in the menu that is popped up over an incorrectly spelled word.

Maximum depth

This parameter controls the depth of the search. The depth parameter can range from 1 (shallow but fast) to 100 (deep but slow). The deeper the search, the more likely the correct spelling will be located.

Minimum score

The spelling checker produces a score ranging from 0 to 100 that describes how closely the suggestion matches the misspelling. The words in the suggestion list are ordered by decreasing word score -- i.e., the first word is the most likely replacement and the last word is the least likely. A higher score will produce better results but it will decrease performance a bit.

Automatically correct as you type

With this option you can have spelling errors fixed without having to confirm each correction. This option can be overridden by an option in the topic class. More about topic classes can be found in Setting up structured authoring.