A few weeks ago at work, I completed a major upgrade of Author-IT, the software tool that I use to write and manage my vast documentation library. Upgrades are nerve-wracking for technical writers because it involves an external entity touching our precious content in mysterious ways. What if all my square bullets turn into round bullets? What if my German-language content is migrated without umlauts? What if all my screenshots turn from color to grayscale?
I tortured myself with these nightmare scenarios as the upgrader churned through the content library, but overall, it seemed successful. The improved user interface upped my productivity a notch, which is fortunate because the decreased application performance is slowing me down, so it evens out.
Then, I discovered that the Spell Checker wasn’t working. I could type “pehrjekhjppp,” run the Spell Checker, and it would find zero errors. Emails to customer support and the user forums did not yield any insight as to why this would happen, and I was forced to export everything to Microsoft Word to do spell checking before I could publish.
Then, one day earlier this week, for no apparent reason the Spell Checker started working. I opened a German-language topic and found red-squiggly lines under every word except “die,” “den,” and “name.” I switched to my English content and ran a library-wide Spell Check, and found that not only did it forget all my previously-learned words, it seemed to be ignorant to many perfectly legitimate words, such as “lifespan,” “lifecycle,” “workflow,” “panning,” “screenshot,” “forklift,” “footage,” and “Unicode,” and would suggest ludicrous archaic words like “liefly,” “breadfruits,” “pourpoint,” and “tirewoman.” Yes, I didn’t mean to type “timeframe,” I totally meant “tirewoman.” Silly me.
Even “email.” Email! A truly ubiquitous word, and my Spell Checker is like, “Did you mean embalm?” I wanted to grab my Spell Checker by his snotty little lapels, demand to know who he thinks uses content management systems in 2008, and then do a two-finger eye poke.
