I am often frustrated by abbreviations in German. I suppose they are so popular as some expressions are so long in German. For example, in Berlin, everyone knows that BVG means Berliner Verkehrsbetriebe, ehemals Berliner Verkehrs (Aktien)Gesellschaft. When you have just arrived from Birmingham, it takes a while to work out what they are talking about.

What I would like is a tool that does a German spell check in a single pass, requiring no manual intervention, just producing an alphabetically sorted list of the failures. Those words that fail the spell check would include most of the abbreviations and give me a list to send to the customer at the start of the job. There is then a reasonable chance that answers would arrive before I have finished.

Of course I could just collect them manually as I work though, but that means I can’t send the list until I have finished. When I have finished, I don’t really want to go back a few days later, when the answers arrive, and open up the job again, when I am in the middle of something else.