i recently praised rfrank for simplifying the procedure of adding a word to the "good-words list", compared to d.p. when a word which _should_ be on that list is missing, proofers have to struggle through the false flagging of that word, and that decreases the efficiency of flagging. for instance, when the name of a character in the book is flagged every time it appears, it can cause "flag fatigue", by virtue of its frequent nature. moreover, it can cause you to miss the cases where the name was misrecognized, because you've grown accustomed to skipping that flag... (if the name is in the good-words list, only an _incorrect_ version of the name gets flagged, which is what we want.) and once your good-words list is _complete_, you can do spellcheck on the book and have it come out _clean_. this is extremely valuable, because it means that you can repeat that spellcheck after any major editing operation (or at any milestone that you decide during the workflow) to make sure that your processing didn't introduce errors. so it's in everyone's best interest to have a good-words list which actually contains all "good words" in the book. which is why rfrank's simple-and-immediate procedure is far superior to the d.p. way, which is hard and slow... but there are methods even better than rfrank's... one of the most useful tools in my arsenal is one that takes text as its input -- up to the entirety of a book -- and quickly spits out a list of words not in its dictionary. thus it gives me a list of words that i'll need to check... but _many_ of these words, primarily _names_, but also words that appear a relatively large number of times, are ones that will go onto the good-words list for the book. so this tool can be used in _preprocessing_ to create a good-words list that is actually compellingly complete. but let's say you did not use this tool in preprocessing, and your good-words list is still missing lots of words... now let's look at a case where a proofer has just finished a page that had a number of words flagged on it, because they were not in the dictionary or on the good-words list. even if the proofer didn't take the time to add the flagged words to the good-words list, should they be auto-added? because, if they're ok on this page, they should be added! in other words, why make the proofer go to _any_ trouble to add a word to the good-words list? just analyze the page they've saved, as "good", finding all words that are not on the good-words list, and adding them automatically? as far as i can see, there are 2 problems that might result. the first is that the proofer made an error, and failed to catch a flagged word that was incorrect. in such a case, that would mean that any other occurrences of that word would not be flagged. that's unfortunate, of course, but is it a great tragedy? i think not. proofers need to know that an unflagged word _might_ be incorrect, n'est pas? of course they do. that's the essence of a stealth scanno. the second problem is that the word might be correct on _this_ page, but is _incorrect_ if it appeared elsewhere, and would need to be flagged there. again, i do not take a failure to flag every bad word as being necessarily bad. but directly to the point of this second possible problem, i simply don't think this situation occurs all that often... so i would like to issue a challenge, to the people who look at more books-in-progress than i do, to _locate_ this situation, where a non-dictionary word is _correct_ on _one_ page, yet _incorrect_ on some _other_ page... after all, this is the raison d'etre for the d.p. procedure, which insists that a word nominated for the good-words list must be inspected/approved by the project manager. so -- if this situation is more common than i believe -- project managers should have _lots_ of examples for me. so let's hear them. anyway, that's the suggestion, that when a page is proofed, all the words which had been flagged are _automatically_ added to the good-words list. and yes, i will also add that i believe such additions should be _screened_ by someone, but that's in keeping with my overall plan that any and all changes that are made will be doublechecked by someone. -bowerbird p.s. if you were quick enough to grok a flip-side suggestion that any word on the good-words list which was _changed_ on any page should automatically be _removed_ from the good-words list, give yourself a gold star for a sharp mind.