ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN LIMA NEWSLETTER JUNE 1990 ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^SPELL IT! ^^^^^^^^^^^reviewed by Charles Good ^^^^^^^^^^^^^Lima Ohio User Group A few months ago I wrote an article about dedicated spell checking computers such as the Franklin Spelling Ace. I still think these devices are useful for single word checking as a document is created, and recommend their use. With the recent release of Asgard's SPELL IT!, we now have a really useful whole document spell checker that can be used with Funnelweb or TI-Writer. Having used the Dragon Slayer spell checker, and the WriterEase dictionary, I can say without reservation that Asgard's SPELL IT! is superior to the other two spell checking programs available for our computers. The Dragon Slayer spell checker has a small main dictionary, only 20000 words. It is eternally slowwwww in checking a document. Once spelling errors in a document are corrected by Dragon Slayer, you usually have to load the document into Funnelweb and reformat the whole thing paragraph by paragraph. This is because Dragon Slayer splits lines each time a correction is made. The result of each spelling correction is an INSERT without a subsequent REFORMAT. The main problem with the 50000 word WriterEase dictionary is that you have to use it with WriterEase. WriterEase only works in 40 columns and does not have all the little TI-Writer word processing enhancements found in Funnelweb. WriterEase is really no better than the original TI-Writer except that it comes with a spell checking dictionary. My main complaint about WriterEase is that you can't load it from ramdisk or hard drive. The WriterEase disk is ultra protected, and you must use the original system disk (it can't be copied) only in DSK1. What a pain! Another problem with the WriterEase dictionary is that the user dictionary it creates uses up enormous amounts of disk space. I don't know why, but you only get three or four words in each disk sector of the WriterEase user dictionary. SPELL IT! consists of the program and several separate dictionaries. It is unprotected, so you can put the program on a ramdisk or hard disk. HOWEVER, the version 1.05 (revised from the initially released v1.01) that I have only works if you put the word list dictionaries themselves on floppies or a hard drive. I have the SPELL-IT! program on my Horizon, but due to space limitations on the Horizon I run the dictionary word lists off of a DSDD floppy. The addendum that came with v1.05 states that "The program now functions well with the HFDC and all RAM-disks (except, apparently, the Horizon RAM disks under some configurations)." This is a rather important "except". As I understand it, the latest versions of ROS have problems with SPELL-IT! dictionaries. An attempt is being made by the software author, Jim Reiss, to correct this problem and an updated version is expected soon. Before you purchase SPELL IT!, check with Asgard about the current state of Horizon ramdisk. When you first run SPELL-IT!, you are asked for the drive number and name of a DV80 text file. All word processors written for the 99/4A can, and usually do, create text files of this type. SPELL-IT! then scans the document and develops a "unique word list" of all the different words in the document. In creating this list, SPELL-IT! ignores punctuation, capitalization, single letters, numbers, and format commands (words that begin with a period). Next, SPELL-IT! compares each of the unique words to the words found in its 19 dictionary word lists and your USER dictionary word list. All of this document scanning and word list comparison takes place in one continuous operation without user intervention, unless it is necessary to swap dictionary disks. A 20 page document probably doesn't have 10 times as many unique words as a 2 page document. The same words tend to be repeated in any text. Thus, it doesn't take SPELL-IT! 10 times as long to check the 20 page document, compared to a 2 page document. The SPELL-IT! program is supposed to recognize common plurals as well as "ed" and "ing" suffixes as valid. The word "work" in a dictionary word list will recognize work, works, working, and worked in a document as correctly spelled. SPELL-IT comes as a DSDD disk version on one disk ($20), a SSSD version on 3 disks ($25), and a hard disk version on 10 disks ($35). The hard disk version has 200000 words in its dictionaries, the other two versions have 25000 words. SPELL-IT! requires all 19 of its own dictionary word lists, plus the USER word list to be in the same drive. This means that single density users (SSSD or DSSD) must switch dictionary disks in and out of the specified dictionary disk drive during the spell checking process. SPELL-IT! can be configured to expect all its dictionaries to be in any drive you want, but they must all be in this drive. It would be nice for single density users if SPELL-IT! could be configured to expect the first dictionary word lists in one drive and then automatically go to another drive for the rest of the dictionary word lists. This would minimize disk swaps for single density users with multiple drives. After spell checking, the user is given the opportunity to do the following with each of the unrecognized words. A)dd to the user dictionary C)orrect the word L)ook for similar words in the dictionary word lists N)ext word, performs no action on the unrecognized word P)revious word. You can scan back and fourth with N/P. V)iew the word in context. A)- The documentation says that the user dictionary can be as large as disk space allows. The DSDD version has 541 free sectors. That would hold a truely massive user dictionary of several thousand words. C)- Corrected words are later written back into your original document file. L)- One, or several, or no words are displayed which SPELL-IT! believes are similar to the unrecognized word. The program logic that does this is not as good as that of the "Franklin Spelling Ace", which does a fantastic job of phonetically guessing the word you are trying to spell. The SPELL-IT! logic is better than that of the WriterEase dictionary, which just presents you with that part of its dictionary where the unrecognized word would fit alphabetically. This fails miserably if the first letter or two of the unrecognized word are incorrect. V)- Several lines of the original text file are displayed, one of which contains the first instance of the unrecognized word. If you have a Geneve or 80 column card you can configure SPELL-IT! to display in 80 columns. Most of the time this 80 column display is not as nice as the 40 column display because the SPELL-IT!'s short prompts seem so small in the middle of an otherwise empty screen. However, when V)iewing a word in context, an 80 column display is an asset. V)iewing an 80 column document in 40 columns splits words in the middle and looks funny. After you have dealt with the last unrecognized word, SPELL-IT! v1.05 writes the corrected text file back into your disk document file under a different file name. Make sure there is room on the disk. V1.01 overwrites the original text file with corrections. If the original word has its first letter capitalized, SPELL-IT! will capitalize the first letter of the corrected word. If the original is all in upper case, SPELL-IT! makes the corrected word all in upper case. If there are no upper case letters in the original word, there will be none in the corrected word. Unlike the way Dragon Slayer writes corrections, lines of your document are not usually split. Document lines are split only if the corrected word is so much longer than the original that it won't fit in the line in place of the original unrecognized word. Thus, minimal or no reformat is needed in the corrected document. Dictionary word lists are simply DV80 files with one word on each line, arranged alphabetically except for the USER list. These are easy to load into Funnelweb and add to or subtract from. You can even substitute lists of foreign language words if you want. SPELL-IT! is comparable, maybe even as good as, some modern spell checkers on IBM clone machines. The combination of 80 column Funnelweb and SPELL-IT! gives our machines word processing capabilities similar to expensive machines. So why buy one of the expensive machines? .PL 1