Inkscape’s built-in spellchecker can use up to three dictionaries at the same time. To set it up, open the Inkscape Preferences dialog, and choose the Spellcheck tab. For example, you can use French as your primary language but add English and Russian as second and third languages. This way, you can check texts in any of these languages or in a combination of the languages, and only the words that are missing in all three languages will be flagged as misspelled. If you only need a single language, leave the second and third options set to None.
Note
On Linux, you need to install Aspell dictionaries for the languages you want to check; use your distribution’s standard software installer for this. On Windows, Inkscape comes prepackaged with dictionaries for several languages (English, French, German, Russian, Spanish, and others).
Note
Many languages have more than one dictionary. For example, English (en) has variants for USA (en_US), UK (en_GB), Canada (en_CA), and Australia (en_AU); the UK variant additionally breaks into subvariants by the preferred verb suffix (en_GB-ise or en_GB-ize), and so on.
Once you invoke the spellchecker with 
(or Text ▸ Check Spelling), it checks all the visible text objects in your document (they need not be selected) in turn, going top-to-bottom and left-to-right. Having found a misspelled word, it displays a red frame around the word and pops up a dialog:
The object with the misspelling is selected; if you are using the Text tool, the editing cursor is placed at the beginning of the misspelled word. In the dialog, you can do any of the following:
Choose one of the listed suggestions (they come from all active dictionaries) and Accept it; this button is disabled unless you choose something in the list.
Ignore once; the next time this word is encountered, the spellchecker will flag it again.
Ignore the word for the rest of this session; it will ignore any other instances of the word during this check, but the next time you run the spellchecker, it will flag it again.
Add the word to one of the active dictionaries so that it is never flagged as misspelled again in this or subsequent sessions.
Also, since the dialog does not lock the Inkscape window, you can simply edit the word with the Text tool, as you would normally do. Once you edit it to something acceptable, the spellchecker will automatically turn off the red frame and continue checking the document.
You can stop the spellcheck at any time by clicking Stop or simply closing the Check Spelling dialog. When it is stopped, you can click Start at any time to restart the check.
To enter a character that does not appear on your keyboard, you need to know its Unicode number. Unicode is a worldwide standard that covers all existing and most historical alphabets, as well as a plethora of other special characters; the best place to look up the Unicode number for a character is http://unicode.org.
Once you know the hexadecimal Unicode number of the character you need, press 
while editing a text object, type the number (watch the status bar for feedback), and press 
. The character will be inserted at the text cursor. Here are a few commonly used special characters:
Name | Character | Hexadecimal number |
|---|---|---|
em dash | — | 2014 |
en dash | – | 2013 |
left curly double quote | “ | 201C |
right curly double quote | ” | 201D |
left curly single quote | ‘ | 2018 |
right curly single quote | ’ | 2019 |
left double guillemet | « | 00AB |
right double guillemet | » | 00BB |
ellipsis | ... | 2026 |
multiplication | × | 00D7 |
copyright | © | 00A9 |
registered sign | ® | 00AE |
trademark | ™ | 2122 |
round bullet | • | 2022 |
If the character you requested exists in the current font, it will be used; otherwise, Inkscape will attempt to find any font on your system that has this character. If that fails, you will see a space inserted instead.