“Why does a program this big not have a spell check” a friend recently asked about Illustrator. “Illustrator does have spell check” I answered.
The thing is… spell check is not turned on by default. So you wouldn’t see the underlined words and without that, you might not realize the option existed at all. Illustrator is a huge program and it is super easy to miss some of the features that are buried in the menus.
In this tutorial, you will learn how to turn on Illustrator’s spell check, manually run the spell check and where you can change the default language for the spell checker.
How to Turn on the Automatic Spell Check in Illustrator
Choose Edit > Spelling >Auto Spell Check
With the auto spell check option enabled Illustrator will signal you there is a spelling or simple grammar error by underlining the words in red. You still have to go in and fix the errors. It should be noted that Illustrator’s ability to detect grammatical errors is pretty basic. It will catch things like duplicate words, and missing capitalization at the beginning of a sentence, but if you want something that is going to catch more advanced errors such as misplaced commas and notifying you if you are using passive voice then you probably want to use an app like Grammarly (and unfortunately that doesn’t work with Illustrator at this time).
Fix the Spelling Errors using the Context Menu
Right-click on a misspelled word to bring up the context menu. Tip: If you are using a Mac with a one-button mouse you can also get the content menu by CTRL-clicking on the misspelled word.
The context menu will offer you a few options: Alternate word choices to replace the misspelled word with the most likely listed first. You will also have the option to Ignore All (which basically closes the menu) or Add to Dictionary which allows you to manually enter words that are not already in Illustrator’s dictionary. This is handy for dealing with specialized language such as chemical names.
Spell Check the Entire Document in Illustrator
From the menu choose Edit > Spelling > Check Spelling OR right-click and from the context menu choose Spelling > Check Spelling or use the hot key combination Ctrl + i (Windows) / CMD + i (Mac).
From the Check Spelling palette. Click the “Start” button.
Once you hit the Start button illustrator will start working through the entire document. For each error, you will be offered a number of options. If for example, the word that Illustrator thinks is wrong is a proper name that you know appears once in the document you can Ignore it if it appears multiple times choose Ignore All or add it to the dictionary by choosing the “Add” option. For each misspelled word Illustrator will offer up a list of alternate words with the most likely first. If that choice is right then choose Change. If you think that error appears elsewhere then you can choose Change All.
How to Change the Language in Illustrator.
Canada has two official languages and while I don’t often use French in illustrator it does happen about once in a blue moon usually for packaging design. Using Illustrator’s English spell check won’t help me so for that I need to change the language of the document and there are two ways to do that.
Method 1 (Changing Preferences)
From the top menu, Choose Edit > Preferences > Hyphenation and from the default language drop-down choose the language you want. Or your can use the hotkey combination Ctrl + k (Windows) | Cmd + k (Mac) to open the preferences and then choose Hyphenation from the left side and then choose your preferred language.
Method 2 (Character Panel)
Click the 3 dot symbol at the bottom of the Character Panel to open it fully. In the lower-left corner of the full palette, you will have an option to set the default language for the document.
Conclusion
In my design process for a document that contains a significant amount of text, I do the vast majority of proofing in word with the Grammarly plugin first. However, I do keep Illustrator’s auto spell check feature enabled as even after I have brought the text into Illustrator I almost always end up tweaking things and the underlines help catch mistakes I might not otherwise. I like being able to right-click and check the word without having to switch to a different program. For another useful text tool – check out How to Convert Case without retyping.
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