Wildcards in spellcheck user dictionary?

[Daniel Geiger]

Is it possible to use wildcart in user dictionary of InDesign?

I use scientific literature citations with year and letter for multiple references by a given author in a given year: 2024a, 2024b etc. Those are flagged as potential missspellings. I would like to add something like

\d\d\d\d\. to the user dictionary.

However, I get error that dictionary words can only contain period as punctuation.

The goal is that spellcheck will ignore all four-digits plus one letter "words", without me having to add every single possible combination manually to the user dictionary.

Thanks!

[Willi Adelberger · Accepted solution]

GREP like wildcards are not possible to add to any dictionary.

But you can tag them as [No Language] property. But this can be done automatically via GREP style.

1. Create a Character Style with the [No Language] property.
2. Create a GREP style in your paragraph style where the Character Style is applied automatically.

[Daniel Geiger]

Thanks! That worked very well. I've used the no-language in character styles before to force no hyphenation in scientific genus-species names.