Fix for InDesign Spellcheck Bug

I was working on an article in Adobe InDesign and it was showing many, many correctly spelled words as misspellings.  I checked online and some forums said to be sure the english dictionary was selected in InDesign’s preferences. I choose the English dictionary again, which I had already checked, resaved the language choice, but InDesign still defined half the words as misspelled!

Here’s how to fix this problem:

  1. Select all the text in the document (May be unnecessary, but it’s what I did when it worked.)
  2. At the top of the screen, in the center of the heads-up menu, underneath the “Character Style” drop-down menu, is the “language selection” drop-down menu.
  3. Click on this drop-down menu and hold down the right mouse button, with all the document text still selected, drag down to the language you wish to apply to the document, in my case English.
  4. Once you do this, the Adobe dictionary definitions and spelling for that language will be applied throughout the document.

Once it’s applied, the Adobe spellchecker is a very good one, but Adobe should make the preferences the default language and this other method an option for special circumstances, not the other way around.

Once you know how to do it, this is pretty easy to fix, but it’s not intuitive at all.  Adobe shouldn’t let this kind of opaque complexity exist in final software, but don’t get me started on monopolies! Of course, if one of us end users selects English as their default language in the preferences, it should apply it as the language selection globally, whether it’s English or whatever other language.  Sorry to say, this is not true in InDesign CC.  Adobe must not care much about inconveniencing their customers, to release software with such a built-in complexity, in such an essential component as the Spell Checker.