Filed under: Software, Tips and tricks, Snow Leopard
Unsung Snow Leopard feature: multiple-language spell checker
OS X has had a system-wide, built-in spell checker for a while now, but until Snow Leopard, it could only check the spelling of whatever your default language was. But what if you needed to prepare a document in another language, say for a college Spanish assignment? In that case, you'd end up with a document with pretty much every single word underlined in red, with no reliable way to spell check it.But now, OS X offers simultaneous spell checking not only in four different varieties of English, but also in Spanish, French, German, Italian, and six other European languages. You can mix and match these languages in a single document, and the built-in spell checker will intelligently adapt to whichever language it thinks you've switched to. Pages from iWork '07 doesn't seem to benefit from this new feature, nor does the 2008 version of Word, but it works just fine in Safari and TextEdit. With TextEdit you get an added feature: once it figures out what language you're typing in, autocorrect will work for that language just as well as it does for English.
View the video below for a brief glimpse of the new spell check behavior in action:
What's free, flexible, easy-to-use but powerful and can handle a wide variety of file types? Our good friend, 
Next, fire up 
So for quite a while now I've been using nothing more complicated than
Who would have thought that one of Apple's most memorable ad campaigns and Leopard's most talked about features would collide? That's right, 
Some people balk at the idea of paying for a text editor. 'Doesn't OS X ship with a pretty good text editor called TextEdit,' they say. That is very true, but if you make your living creating text documents (whether they be code, blog posts, or content of some other kind) TextEdit just won't cut it.
Over at MacOSXHints, Rob G. has posted a must-read
In my newsreader today I saw an 'iPhoto Action Pack' from Automator World that adds a handy action for workflows involving iPhoto: "Find iPhoto Item Path". While debating whether that was TUAW-worthy, my newsreader became bombarded with more headlines like System Action Pack, TextEdit Action Pack, Preview Action Pack... until I finally decided to post a roundup to cover them all in one fell swoop. So here you go kids, a whole batch of Automator Actions that add some missing abilities to everyone's favorite (or the only?) OS automation utiliity:
If you're the
type that spends the day staring at a display and typing code, we'd bet you'd appreciate any utility that will make the
process easier. Check out
When I'm
writing an e-mail or fiddling in TextEdit, I often copy in text from another location (Safari, another e-mail, etc.).
Doing that, of course, copies the formatting along with it, screwing up the consistency of the document. (So, say I'm
writing a 12-point Arial doc in TextEdit; I copy over some 10-point Verdana bold text from Safari, and all of a sudden
I have a single doc with two different kinds of formatting -- and selecting the text and reapplying my previous
settings is a time-consuming pain in the butt.)
![TUAW [Cafepress]](http://www.blogsmithmedia.com/www.tuaw.com/media/tuaw-cafepress-promo.png)

