One of the particularly useful aspects of using a word-processor is that you can get the computer to check your spelling for you.
Deliberately misspell a word in your document.
Pull down the Tools menu and choose the Spelling option.A sub-menu is displayed.
Select the Spelling option.The computer will find your first spelling error and bring up a dialogue box like this:
This dialogue box has the following options:
Field Purpose
Ignore If you click this button, the spell checker will ignore the spelling error it has just found.
Ignore All If you click this button, the spell checker will ignore all occurrences of the current spelling error in the document.
Add Clicking this button adds the current spelling error to the dictionary, so that it is no longer considered a spelling error.
Change This button will replace the misspelled word with the currently selected word in the bottom half of the dialogue box.
Change All Choosing this option will cause the spell checker to replace all occurrences of the misspelled word with the currently selected word in the bottom half of the dialogue box.
Cancel Clicking this button will abort the spell-check.
Change to: This field shows the word that will replace the misspelled word if you click the Change or Change All buttons.
Select the correct word from the list in the bottom half of the dialogue box and click the Change All button.The computer should now find the next misspelled word, however in the version of Abiword I am currently running, the spell check completes at this point. This seems to be a bug in Abiword that will no doubt be corrected in a version coming soon.
Other ways to spell check your document
If you misspell a word, Abiword automatically underlines the word with a jagged red line. (See picture below).
If you click on the underlined word with the right hand mouse button, you will get a menu of possible correct spellings displayed (see below).
You can then select the correct spelling and the document will be automatically updated.