Question about spellcheck and formating

If I create a choice of games book, then save as it in a word format, then spellcheck it, ore more, acuritly grammer check it, then switch it back. Would that work, or will that screw up the formatting?

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When I copyedit a game, I select-all a whole chapter, copy-paste it into a new word document, run spellcheck and manually fix any errors it finds in the original txt file. This way there’s no danger to the original txt file.

Obviously, this won’t catch game bugs, gender typos, dialogue errors, inconsistencies in names or other specialized terms, or even catch the majority of issues a copyeditor checks for, but it’s a good first step.

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I write my copy in a writing program (Scrivener) which has a spell-checker, etc built in. I then copy it into CSIDE to script and format everything properly to run Choice Script.

Some word processors (notepad++) are very easy to script directly into, and they also have spell checkers. If you use these, an online or web-based grammar-checker (example: Grammarly) would be best to use.

So, the first thing you’ll need to explain is what program or app you create your game in… if you create it in CSIDE, it has a good basic spell-checker built into it as well.

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One thing you should be aware of is that copy-pasting the text back-and-forth may cause issues with indentation. I can’t speak for other programs, but sometimes CSIDE gets a little glitchy when you’re copy-pasting text from Word to CSIDE. I personally use Atom for storing text with correct indentation, but I don’t edit in Atom, so I can’t confirm if it has a spellcheck.

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I would like to note (pun intended) that, like Notepad++, some word processors correct for British English instead of American English when spellchecking. That might be something to keep an eye out for when switching between programs, because I imagine something that is spelled correctly in one dialect might be caught in another program even though it is technically spelled right.

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I mean, in short, yes. There’s lots of potential to screw up the formatting. This is also why I caution authors to never compose in a word processing type application and then paste that into a text editor. Smart apostrophes/quotes are the enemy of all that is good. COG also requires unicode ellipsis and em-dash.

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Microsoft Office Word is a rich-text editor. What you want is a plain-text editor with spell check. There are a couple out there and some are even free.

Theoretically you could open a plain text file in word, edit it and save as plain text. But it’s going to be an uphill battle. Word will constantly try to format your text, even automatically replacing some characters for others, like dumb quotes for smart quotes. And you can’t be sure Word’s tab-length is consistent with what you have been using. You would have to disable all automatic formatting and then re-enable them once finish. It’s more trouble than it’s worth in my opion.

There are plug-ins to add spell-check to Notepad++ and Atom, so they might be worth checking out.

Sometimes I use Write Monkey, it’s very simple and has a distraction-free mode I like. It also has a spell-checker, albeit only for American English. The shortcut is F7. You can also install the auto-indent plug-in from their web-site that keeps new lines at the same indentation level as the previous one. It’s helpful.

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(Jinx.) Yours is the correct/the green checkmark solution answer.

Sublime Text (free) has a spellcheck function, btw.

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I use CSIDE exclusively, am I doing it wrong?

I was not going to coppy and paste, was more thinking of takeing each scigne file, converting it to word, spell-checking the word version, then converting it back, replaceing the plane text original with this new, spell-checked, plane-text original.

Maybe you could try it on a short piece or a bit of sample code to see if any problems arise. It sounds like it will probably introduce problems with the code structure, but it’s worth a test. Even if the tests work cleanly, I’d recommend doing a quick save-as before converting large portions of text, just to give you a back up.

No, there’s nothing wrong with using only CSIDE. It has a spellchecker in it. But if you’re looking to use the spellcheckers in other programs, you need to be wary about repasting code into CSIDE, because some programs make changes to formatting that translate poorly into CSIDE and cause errors.

I don’t know how much it messes up formatting, (random and quick tests always pass), but as non-native English speaker, I use Grammarly or Prowritingaid.

It’s always good to read thou how one should format text in COG in the right way (there was doc somewhere with guidelines).

I’m having a difficulty with quick tests and random tests, it keeps giving me errors when I try to open them., So they are both in Java, so maybe that has something to do with it? Normally I does run through everything line by line to see what errors I can fix. At least it gives me time to think on what I want to do. Even though I’m still just doing a fanfic, so I do have some constraints as far as personality and such. Still, good exercise either way.