At some point in the past the spell checker used by AR has changed. For some time it simply did not want to work, but then, after more mess than we usually have, it started working again. The first thing I noticed is that it started giving a much longer list of words. Very soon I figured that this adds frustration, and does not help at all. Some of the misspellings pull the list of 63 words, and they take the whole page, and to choose "Ignore word" you have to scroll down (and the drop down list does not disappear like it used to, when you start scrolling), and after clicking do back to the work window.
When you have such a long list, it does not help when the word is there, however the new spell checker started missing the right spelling for many words, that it had no problem identifying before.
Let us take the letter "x, and see how the spell checker handles the misspellings. Below are 15 words where the letter x is missing. I did not include the words like eternal, as the spell checker would not consider it a misspelling. So, here we are:
- etra, offers 11 words, but no right word, which is extra
- eample, 15 words and no right word
- eception, 6 words, no right one
- taes, 53 words, and still no right word
- proimity, 14 words, no right word
- fa , The spell checker does not recognize that there is anything wrong with fa
- eceptional, 5 words, no right one
- ecellent, 14 words, no right one
- etraordinary, 3 words, and one of those is the right one
- etravagant, 8 words, and one is the right
- eterior, 25 and no right one
- eercise, 70 words, no right one
- eecute, 39 words, no right one
- epensive 67 words, no right one
- epanse 67 words, no right one
As you can see, out of 15 words, the spell checker failed in 13, making it simply useless. Imagine that on those 67 and 70 word long lists you have to scroll 3 times to get to the end (and still not finding the word.
Interestingly enough, the old spell checker was finding the right word for these 15 words with no problem, and it did not go longer than, I think, 5 words.
Do you notice similar problems with the spell checker sabotaging the very task it has?
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