I use Microsoft Word, and I’m generally pretty happy with it. If I’m wrong to be happy, that’s fine, but I’m highly unlikely to invest the effort to switch to another word processor.
I would, however, like to be able to get the spell checker to ignore square brackets — [ and ]. I don’t want it to ignore text inside those brackets, only the brackets themselves. As blog readers may have noticed, it’s standard legal practice (and I imagine standard in some other disciplines as well) to note changes in quotes using brackets, for instance, “Adher[ing] to [the United States’] enemies.” I want the spell checker to treat the first word as simply “Adhering,” rather than “Adher” followed by another word “ing.”
Is there some way to get Word to do this? I’ve looked and asked, but couldn’t find a good answer. Right now I’m copying the document, changing all [s and ]s in the document to empty strings, spell-checking the copy, and then making the necessary corrections to the original. I wonder, though, whether there’s a simple way of avoiding this. (Switching to some supposedly better word processor doesn’t qualify as a simple way, though buying a program that can quickly and easily spell-check Word files does qualify.)
If you have any suggestions, please e-mail me at volokh at law.ucla.edu.
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