Spell check option to skip master pages

Question

I'm still running CS3 so perhaps this has already been solved for but I need a spell check option to ignore the master pages. I'm a magazine designer and our master pages contain placeholder text so we can work our layouts before we have final copy. Problem is we can never run an effective spell check because there is no option to ignore the master pages so a spell check tries to check the lorum ipsum text rendering it useless. It would be wildy helpful if in the search dropdown option you could select "no masters" or something of the sort. Similar to the option in the Find/Change search dropdown, where you can choose "story" instead of "document"; in fact, this same functionality in Find/Change would be great as well. Also, "Story" is a good option, the whole document minus the master pages would be even better. That way we could check all of the active text in the document, including folios, rubrics and captions that are divided from the story.
Let me know if I can explain this better.

Answer 1

Spring Step Creative wrote:
Peter,
I'm familiar with the workaround. Trouble is when you place or paste 
your text in later, you have to remember to take it off of "no 
language" or it will continue to ignore the text. We're dealing with 
editors here, with very quick turnarounds, and the whole idea is not 
to make a mistake. Just think how easy it would be to forget to turn 
off "no language", run a spell check and think you're good to go to 
press. ... and don't say InCopy has the solution, because its not a 
useful product for us; it's cumbersome and doesn't serve us well at 
all. I really think adding functionality that would allow you to 
simply filter out the master pages in a spell check would be an 
excellent help.
Have you tried creating customized placeholder text, something like "Replace this placeholder text with real text and tag the replacement text with such-and-such paragraph style." instead of lorem ipsum? You do this by creating a text file named "placeholder.txt" that contains your customized text, and saving it in the main InDesign directory. When you perform Type > Fill With Placeholder Text, the customized text appears with instructions.
You can create object styles for the placeholder text frames that apply the no-language paragraph style. You can make the no-language paragraph style a color, bold, etc, to call even more attention to it.
A simpler option would be to assure that all the text in your customized placeholder.text file is spelled correctly, so it doesn't get a hit when spell checking.
Being able to omit Master pages from spell checks is a good idea. Would you want it to be a scope option in the spell checker, or a property of a master page? If it were a master page property, you could specify which master pages are skipped. You can enter a formal feature request at
https://www.adobe.com/cfusion/mmform/index.cfm?name=wishform.
HTH
Regards,
Peter
Peter Gold
KnowHow ProServices