Find, replace and spell check text in Paint by Zaweba

A misspelt word on a printed banner is expensive and very public. Text set in graphics is hard to proofread, too, because the eye sees the design before it reads the words. Paint by Zaweba has two quiet helpers for this: Find and Replace Text, and a spell checker that works as you type.

Both are under the Edit menu and both work without an internet connection.

Find and Replace Text

Edit > Find and Replace Text searches the words in your text layers. You can search every text layer in the document or only the active one. Options for match case and whole word stop it catching the wrong thing. Find Next jumps to each match in turn, Change replaces the current one, and Change All replaces every match in one go.

The obvious use is a change of detail. An event moves from Saturday to Sunday, a price changes, or a client decides they prefer Ltd to Limited. Rather than hunting through a busy poster for every mention, search once and change all.

It is also useful for documents with many artboards, such as a set of social posts in different sizes. The same headline appears on each one, so a single Change All updates them together.

Whole word matters more than it looks. Replacing tea with coffee without whole word on will also change steam to scoffeem. Match case helps with names and brand words that must keep their capitals.

Spell checking

Edit > Check Spelling walks through the text and stops at words the dictionary does not recognise. You can also have spelling underlined as you type, the same red underline you see in a word processor, so mistakes show up the moment they are made.

Paint uses Windows' own offline spell checker, with British English tried first. So colour, organise and centre are correct by default, which saves the irritation of an American dictionary flagging every other word. Because the checker is part of Windows, nothing you type is sent anywhere.

A proofing routine that works

Run Check Spelling as the last step before export, after any late edits. Then read the text aloud from the screen at a decent zoom level; spell checkers do not catch the right word in the wrong place, such as form instead of from.

Check numbers separately. Phone numbers, dates, prices and web addresses pass any spell checker even when they are wrong. Compare them against the client's brief one by one.

For names and technical words that the checker flags, check them against the source rather than trusting your memory, and do not be tempted to change a correct but unusual spelling just because it is underlined.

Limits to keep in mind

These tools read text layers. Text that has been rasterised, traced or converted to shapes is no longer text, so it cannot be searched or checked. That is one more reason to keep text live for as long as you can and only convert it at the very end, if at all.

Text inside a placed picture, such as a photo of a sign, is pixels too, so the tools will not see it.

Where proofing fits

Find and Replace and spell checking belong with the Text tool, the Type Styles panel and the Character and Paragraph panel. Together they make Paint by Zaweba a safe place to finish text-heavy graphics like flyers, menus and labels, not just photos.