Tools Ribbon

Various options are available in the Tools ribbon for working with and improving your project.

Option

Description

Opens the Open Dictionary dialog, which lets you choose a custom global or project dictionary so you can make changes to it. See Editing Custom Dictionaries.

Opens the Spell Check window pane, which lets you perform spell checking manually.

Activates a feature that lets you check your spelling as you type in your topics. Questionable words are underlined with a jagged red line. You can take action with the word by right-clicking on it. See Spell Checking While Typing.

Opens the Ignored Words dialog, which lets you create a list of words to be ignored when using the spell checking feature in the application.

See Spell Check and Adding Words to the Ignore Spell Check List.

Opens the Thesaurus window pane, which lets you quickly view and select words related to those in an open topic or snippet. See Thesaurus.

Opens the Text Analysis window pane, which lets you evaluate your files for things such as readability, average sentence length, and more. See Text Analysis.

Opens the Hyphenation window pane, which lets you add custom hyphenation rules for words so that they are hyphenated at the end of lines after specific letters. See Setting Hyphenation.

Opens the Template Manager, where you can perform a variety of tasks to manage your template files. See Managing Templates.

Opens the Context-sensitive Help API Tester dialog, which lets you test the context-sensitive Help links that you've created in the Alias Editor. See Testing Context-Sensitive Help.

Opens the Export Header Files dialog, which lets you export existing header files in your project to another location. You can export header files to the following formats: C/C++ (.h), Visual Basic (.bas), Java (.properties), Delphi Pascal (.inc). Work with your developer to determine the appropriate format(s) to use. See Providing a Developer With Files and Information.

Opens the Update Cross-References dialog, which lets you update the cross-references that you have added to topics. By updating the cross-references, you can ensure that they reflect any changes in your project that might affect them.

Updating cross-references is not a mandatory step. When you generate output for a target, all of your cross-references will be updated automatically. However, you can use this feature to manually update cross-references in a single topic. This is a way of performing a "spot check" ahead of time, verifying that cross-references will be updated accurately before you generate the entire target.

Regenerates (updates) all of the images in your project. The primary reasons for using this option are to remove watermarks and to modify PROPS files. See Regenerating Images.

Opens a submenu, which lets you open various integrated MadCap Software products.

  • MadCap Capture Opens the MadCap Capture application (if you have it installed on your computer), which lets you capture and edit images. See Images.
  • MadCap Mimic Opens the MadCap Mimic application (if you have it installed on your computer), which lets you create and edit movies. See Videos.

Lets you record your actions so that they become a macro command that you can use to repeat the same task. See Recording Macros.

Lets you select one of your recorded macros so that you can play it back. See Playing Back Macros.

Lets you open a dialog so that you can make changes to any macros you've recorded. See Managing Macros.