Limited Spellcheck possible?

[SomeSteve]

Is it possible to limit the Spellcheck in Sigil to one part or section or file at a time, such as Section0001.xhtml, or specify what section to start with?

[KevinH]

You can use the built in CodeView spell check while typing (red squiggley underline) to check words in the main language of the epub file by file. But there is no way to limit the standalone spellcheck dialog to just one file without literally removing all others and using Add Existing... to add them back one file at a time.

If your language is supported by PageEdit spellchecking, you could use its spellcheck on one file at a time.

What is the use case that requires file by file spellchecking?

Many times the same words are misspelled in multiple files meaning that doing the spellcheck file by file would require fixing the same mistake multiple times. That would be very inefficient.

[KevinH]

Given hunspell is supported in Sigil plugins, you could do a file by file spellcheck in a specifically designed Sigil plugin if you are familiar with python programming.

Alternatively, you could use find and replace to add or change the language attribute in the html tag in all files you wanted to exclude from spellchecking to be some unsupported language code. Words without a dictionary in that language are considered correct (not marked as errors) in the Spellcheck dialog.

Updating that a page at a time should do what you want.

[theducks]

Codeview spell check (red underline) has a context menu. Learn to use Context menus as they can offer additional features)
In this case: word suggestions, action suggestions
And NOT on this menu: F4 Jump to next Misspelled word

[SomeSteve]

Originally Posted by KevinH

What is the use case that requires file by file spellchecking?

It's a long book in German, hundreds of pages long, over 100 sections, that I'm trying to clean up as much as possible, bit by bit, before actually reading it, so that I won't be so distracted by mistakes while reading. It's strenuous enough reading it without distractions! Some errors will remain, but at least there won't be so many. There are hundreds of misspelled words, or at least flagged as misspelled, either because OCR thought the letter c was an e, a lower case L was the digit 1, the letter t was a lower case L; because a period or some other mark was inserted in the middle of a word for no reason ("ei.ther"), etc.; because words have been split where they shouldn't have been (such as "rea ding" instead of "reading"); because the words are compounds that are actually correct; because a word is more dialect or slang ("nuthin doin"); or because the book uses traditional orthography instead of reformed orthography, and Sigil's built-in dictionary uses the reformed orthography.

It's easier to scroll down the list and wait for things to catch my eye, click on them and check whether within the context they're correct or not (it can vary, and many I have to confirm with the printed edition), than to go through one by one clicking "ignore," "ignore," "ignore," etc.

I have already caught most of the errors, I think, but up until today I never understood why the spelling checker started with certain words. I've never used Spellcheck before, certainly never with the German dictionary, but still, to my shame, I must admit that up to the time I posted my question, I didn't realize that it was starting in reverse alphabetical order (with words beginning with the letter ü), or that you could set the list to normal alphabetical order, which in itself makes things a lot easier, because I'll be able to note better where in the alphabet I left off.

Thanks for taking the time to answer my question and propose possible solutions.