Whenever you see a text box accompanied by a Dictionary Button in Mangia!, you need to type or select a Term from the Dictionary. If you select a Term from the pop-up menu you get when you click the Dictionary Button, it’s guaranteed to be from the Dictionary. But if you type something, and it can’t be found in the Dictionary, either you’ve misspelled something that’s there or you’re using a new Term that needs to be added to the Dictionary before proceeding further. Mangia! has no way of knowing which is true, so it brings up the Spelling Checker to ask you how to proceed. This is a dialog that expresses Mangia!’s confusion about the matter, highlights the mysterious word or phrase in an editable text box, and offers you several options on how to proceed:
• The Pick from Dictionary button acts like a standard Dictionary Button. When you click on it, up comes a menu for selecting an existing Term.
• The Pick from Suggestions button is similar, but rather than a menu drawn from the entire set of appropriate Terms, it tries to guess what you might have meant and offers a menu of such possibilities.
• The Add to Dictionary button is the right choice if you mean to include your word or phrase in Mangia! ’s Dictionary as a new Term. Clicking this button will bring up a dialog in which you confirm the spelling of your new Term and optionally provide other information about it, such as its Category or (in the case of ingredients) the store section in which it is found.
• You can also edit your typing as shown in the text box to make it a valid Term.
Whatever choice you make, the OK button will become available when you’ve provided a valid Term. But you can always click Cancel to dismiss the Spelling Checker and back up and try again.
It may be that what you originally typed makes sense to you as a way to refer to the Term you ultimately select (for example, you might like to abbreviate “tablespoon” as “T.”). Once you’ve shown Mangia! what you really meant, you can check the Remember Correction box before leaving the Spelling Checker. Thenceforth, Mangia! will make the same leap all on its own (interpreting, in this example, “T.” to mean “tablespoon”).
