Removing the Sea of Red in InDesign
One of the features I’ve always appreciated in InDesign is the built-in ability to insert placeholder text, also known as greeking, in your documents via a menu command (Type > Fill with Placeholder Text). Selecting this command fills the remaining space of your text frame with “lorem ipsum”. A handy feature when you need to quickly comp out a design before you have the real copy for certain text frames.
However, InDesign CS2 introduces another great feature: Dynamic Spelling. This feature will actively spellcheck the text your typing or flowing in and then add red squiggle lines underneath suspect words, quite similar to Microsoft Word. For some odd reason, Dynamic Spelling isn’t on by default so be sure to turn this new feature on (Edit > Spelling > Dynamic Spelling) if you appreciate this kind of active feedback.
Now here’s the rub. When you turn Dynamic Spelling on and have placeholder text in your document, you’ll soon realize what I mean by “Sea of Red”. InDesign CS2 isn’t aware that the placeholder text is merely greeking and shouldn’t be spellchecked. So all your placeholder text is filled with tons of red squiggles. This not only can be distracting but it can make it difficult to design around the text in this state.
Fortunately, there’s an easy way to tell the spellchecker to ignore selections of text. Select all the placeholder text with the Type tool and either in the Character Formatting Control palette or the Character palette, change the Language menu to [No Language]. This little trick should also work when you want to omit blocks of text from spellchecking in the non-dynamic sense.
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