Pedigree Forge includes a built-in British English spell checker. It works very similar to a conventional spell checker, where misspelt words are underlined in red, with the addition that “ignored” words are still underlined, but in a magenta.
This is useful in genealogy, it isn’t uncommon when transcribing an old document for there to be spelling mistakes. This mistakes can be marked as “ignored”, to flag that they aren’t quite correct.
Spell checking is applied to text fields, i.e. where text is entered, as well as on any charts and reports.
In the following example, Pedigree Forge doesn’t recognise “Joshiah” or “Wedgewood” and so has underlined both in red, in the person panel (where the information is added and edited).
And on the chart we are working with:
The spelling checks only show on the screen; if a chart or report is printed or exported, the spell check underlining doesn’t appear.
In the above example, we have spelt Joshiah wrongly. In the text-editing field, we can highlight the misspelt word and then right-click with the mouse to be presented with options. This includes some spelling suggestions:
Selecting “Josiah” will change the word to the correct spelling:
In regard to Wedgewood, the accepted spelling for this family appears to be Wedgwood, i.e. without an “e”. We can use the spelling suggestion to correct that, as with Josiah. However, if we were transcribing an old document with the particular spelling of Wedgewood, we might want to retain the word, but mark it as ignored:
This spelling would then be underlined in magenta, to show that it is being ignored:
The spell checker dictionaries and ignored words are per project. Words that have been added or ignored can be viewed from the Project Settings panel (the cog icon in the lower-left corner of the Pedigree Forge main window). The “Spelling and hyphenation” section isn’t shown by default, so you will need to click on the button next to it to expand the view.
Each word in the lists of added and ignored words must be on its own line. When you have added any words, the “Update” button will apply the changes to Pedigree Forge’s dictionary. If you remove words, this doesn’t take effect until next time you open Pedigree Forge.
On loading Pedigree Forge, any user dictionaries on your computer will be read-in too. These aren’t are shared between many common Windows programs, but not all.
Pedigree Forge uses hyphenation when it needs to break a word across a line boundary—mostly to create similar length lines when justifying text. This most commonly occurs in reports, but certain style of charts allow hyphenation of words too.
Pedigree Forge has built-in rules for hyphenation, which will do a reasonable job on most occasions, but if you want to specify hyphenation opportunities for particular words, then you can do so. These should be added to the “Hy~phen~ation” text box, located on the Project Settings panel—see section on spelling to locate this.
Each word should be entered on a separate line, and the tilde character ~ should be used to indicate in where the word hyphens can be added if needed.
The “antiquarian” style chart is one where text is justified. In the example below, we can see that Pedigree Forge has hyphenated Wedgwood as Wedg-wood, to fit into the space available for justification:
This was automaticity applied but if it hadn’t been, we could have entered the hyphenation opportunity into the “Hy~phen~ation” text box as Wedg~wood.
As with spell checking, once the text has been entered, the “Update” button must be clicked to apply.