Managing your Definely settings

The Definely settings wheel is where you can check your installation details and tailor how Definely behaves in your documents, from spell-check language to highlighting, quotation marks and how flagged items are shared with your team.

Click the settings wheel at the top right corner of the Definely side panel to open the settings menu. From here you can review your installation details and adjust your preferences. Once you're finished, your changes will apply to the documents you work on going forward.

At the top of the settings panel you can check:

This is useful information to have to hand if you ever need to contact support, as including it in your message helps the support team investigate any issues faster.

You can switch the spell-check language between:

Auto-detect is handy if you work across both UK and US-style documents and don't want to change the setting manually each time.

Note: Definely also supports Swedish, but it isn't enabled by default. If you'd like Swedish added to your build, please get in touch with your Customer Success Manager.

Choose how the Definely side panel updates as you work:

Changes to paragraphs (such as adding or removing them) affect Definely's ability to navigate accurately to the correct locations in your document. That's why paragraph changes act as a trigger for rescanning, and why you'll see a refresh prompt when this setting is enabled.

Decide whether Definely should automatically detect new potential defined terms as you work:

This is useful when you're in the middle of heavy drafting and don't want refresh prompts interrupting your flow.

You can update the highlighting scheme Definely uses in the document and panel. This is particularly useful for users who are visually impaired or have a preference for higher-contrast colours, as picking the scheme that's easiest for you to read makes long reviews far more comfortable.

Definely supports highlighting schemes designed for various colour vision deficiencies, including:

This setting controls whether Definely highlights terms that have been deleted when Tracked Changes is enabled in your document. Turning it on makes deleted defined terms easier to spot during a review, particularly when you're working through a heavily marked-up draft.

Set the style of quotation marks you want to use across your documents. Once your preference is saved, Proof will flag anything in the document that deviates from your chosen style, so you can quickly bring everything into line.

When Definely inserts a cross-reference for you, it can use either a:

Choose whichever matches your document's style. Non-breaking spaces are useful when you want to make sure a clause number doesn't get separated from the word "clause" by a line break.

Set your preferred number of spaces after a full stop. Proof will flag anything that doesn't match your chosen setting under the spacing issues subcategory, useful for keeping a long document consistent throughout.

This setting controls how deep Definely goes when exporting definitions from the Definition Report:

Choose All Levels when you want a fully self-contained export to share with a client or colleague, or First Level when you only need the top-level terms.

You can customise the keyboard shortcuts for accessing features in the Definely ribbon and performing actions within the tool. This is particularly useful for power users who want to keep their hands on the keyboard and speed up repetitive tasks like opening the panel, scanning the document, or jumping between definitions.

Hardware acceleration uses your computer's hardware (such as the GPU or CPU) to improve the performance of certain tasks, like rendering or processing, instead of relying solely on software. Enabling this can help when working with very large documents.

This setting ensures Definely scales correctly based on your screen's DPI (dots per inch) settings, providing clear visuals and consistent sizing on high-resolution displays. Turn this on if highlighting or panel elements don't look quite right on your screen, particularly when you're working on an external monitor.

This option increases the size of the Go To button on the Home screen for improved clickability. It's only available in the older version of the Definely user interface.

By default, the items you flag or hide in Proof are visible only to you. If you'd like your colleagues to see the same flagged and hidden items within Draft when they review the same document, change the setting to Visible to others.

This is particularly helpful in the Definition Report, for example, where you've hidden words that have been identified as undefined but don't actually need a definition. Sharing these means a colleague doesn't have to go through and re-hide the same items.

Please note: the colleague you're sharing the document with will also need to:

If either side of the share hasn't enabled the setting, the flagged and hidden items won't sync.

If you've made changes you'd like to undo, click the Reset button in the bottom right-hand corner of the settings panel. This will restore your settings to their defaults.