Multilingual? Heck, what about us who can barely handle our own language? (Which is most of us… : )

This article was originally written in English. Text in other languages was provided by machine translation.

Here at the Adobe Globalization team, we are interested in anything related to language.  How to make our products available in more languages, how to make information about the products available in more languages, and how to help developers build better multi-lingual applications.

Helping people communicate better in their own language is another interest of ours, and to that extent we have developed an ActionScript spell checking component called Squiggly.  (For those who are not native English speakers, the wavy red lines you see under misspelled words in word processors are called “squiggly lines”).  Squiggly is available on Adobe Labs as a free download and can be integrated into any Flex or ActionScript application.  The beauty of Squiggly lies in its simplicity.   All you need to do is to add the following one line to your app:

SpellUI.enableSpelling(textArea, “es_ES”);

That’s it!  By doing this, you get check-as-you-type spell checking with red squiggly lines, a right click menu that displays spelling suggestions, and the ability to add words to a custom user dictionary.  How about that for simplicity?  You can see a demo of this on Adobe Labs.