Antidote 11 User Guide

User Guide / Customizations / Custom Rules / Configuring a Rule

Configuring a Custom Rule

Select the list to which you want to add a rule, then click on the button in the toolbar.

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Activation word or text

In the Search for a word to flag area, enter the word or text that will activate the rule. A search menu will offer words corresponding to what you have typed. Apart from the first text-based suggestion, each proposed word is accompanied by its category as well as an extract from its definition to help you make a choice.

  • The suggested words use the following colour code: green if the typed characters correspond to those of the suggested word; blue if the suggested word is in your personal dictionaries; black in other cases.

Variable activation

If the activation word has more than one inflected form (nouns, adjectives, etc.), or if it has variants (adapter, adaptor), specify the forms that will activate the rule. By default, the corrector will detect all forms. If needed, uncheck any forms that you do not wish to be detected.

  • In the case of verbs, all conjugated forms will activate the rule.

Text activation

The first element of the search menu always includes the note Text. This note means that the corrector will activate the rule if it comes across text that matches the text typed exactly. Text activation can be useful for complex expressions that are not included in Antidote’s dictionaries, such as a trademark or a company name.

  • Activation text includes the note text in your list of custom rules.

Case sensitivity

For text activation, use the Aa button to specify if the case (capital or lowercase letters) is important. By default, the rule is not case-sensitive. Click on this button to enable case-sensitive activation.

Languages menu

For text activation, specify which language the rule should apply to (if you have two languages).

Type of flagging: alert or correction

A rule can generate an alert (thin underlining) or a correction (thick underlining). An alert is like a warning: it aims to draw your attention to the text or word that has activated the rule without necessarily replacing it with something else. A correction means that the word or text should be replaced. In this case, the rule should be applied by providing a replacement word or text.

  • Custom rules are underlined in purple. They are easily distinguished from Antidote’s built-in alerts (underlined in orange) or corrections (underlined in red). Purple is also used in the corrector’s list of detections and in the statistical filter of error types, bringing your custom detections to the forefront.
  • Your list of rules clearly distinguishes alerts (indicated as Alert) from corrections (arrow followed by replacement).

Replacement

If the rule should generate a correction, specify the replacement word or text in the Replace with… area. A search menu will offer words corresponding to what you have typed. Apart from the first text-based suggestion, each proposed word is accompanied by its category as well as an extract from its definition to help you make a choice.

  • The word or text that will activate the rule must belong to the same category as its replacement. If it does not, analysis of the sentence may fail once the replacement has been applied. If the categories do not correspond, Antidote will ask you to select another replacement word.

Antidote’s corrector will generate a detection which will suggest replacing the activation word or text with the replacement. You will still be free to accept or reject the correction.

If your replacement is a word that Antidote knows, the replacement’s grammatical agreement will be the same as the original text (number, person, tense, mood, etc.). So, if the replacement word is nice, adj, the corrector is able to use nice, nicer or nicest according to the original form.

If Text is indicated with your chosen element, the corrector will simply suggest the selected replacement text, regardless of the original grammatical agreement in the original text. So, if the replacement text is nice Text, the corrector will always suggest nice as a replacement.

  • A correction with replacement text will generate a manual correction (thick dotted underlining). In this case, the corrector will offer a Replacement command in the tooltip to perform the correction.
  • For text activation, the replacement can only be text.

Title

Give a title to the tooltip that will accompany your detection by selecting it from Antidote’s suggestions or creating your own. This title will be displayed in purple before the explanation and, for alerts, also in the upper left-hand corner of the tooltip.

Explanation

Write the explanation for your rule in this area, or keep the one suggested by Antidote. This is the explanation that will be displayed in the tooltip when a rule is activated. The and buttons at the bottom of the area add bold and italic respectively to the selected text.

  • When a rule generates a detection, the explanation in the tooltip will be followed by a See the rule… link, which will open the rule in question with a single click for any modifications.
  • The explanation has a 500-character limit for consistency with Antidote’s own corrections.