 The magazine of the Melbourne PC User Group Spell Catcher Bernadette Houghton bernieh@iaccess.com.au |
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The beauty of Spell Catcher is that it works across all applications, so you can switch off other spell checkers and maintain just a single set of dictionaries. Spell Catcher has not just a main dictionary with around 86,000 words but also medical, legal, engineering/scientific and HTML dictionaries. There is a thesaurus and a shorthand glossary, and Spell Catcher is even clever enough to detect a range of simple punctuation errors and typographic issues.
How It Works
Spell Catcher nestles in the system tray, watching as you type. The first
time you start an application, it asks whether you want it to monitor that application. If you choose 'yes',
Spell Catcher actively watches out for typos, punctuation errors and shorthand, and reacts according to how
you've configured it to react (Figure 2). For instance, you might choose to have it beep and open the
Suggestions window so you can deal with errors on the spot. Or, you might prefer to have it store errors so
you can deal with them later. Maybe you'd prefer to invoke it only on demand. Please yourself. Spell Catcher
is a very flexible program, and you can customise it to ignore certain errors and to behave differently in
different applications.
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Spell Catcher's Suggestions window offers suggestions for incorrectly spelled words, and you simply double-click the correct word to insert it into your document (Figure 3). If none of Spell Catcher's suggestions are appropriate, you can type in your own correction and, if you wish, add it to a supplementary dictionary or shorthand glossary (Figure 4-5). You can't modify the main dictionaries, but you can create as many supplementary dictionaries as you wish. When you add words to a dictionary, you can define their proper capitalisation and choose from a set of predefined suffixes for Spell Catcher to recognise as variations of the same word.
Sometimes you'll find that Spell Catcher overlooks 'incorrect' spellings or suggests words that are not appropriate for your purposes - American spellings, for instance. When this happens, you add the undesirable words to a Negative dictionary to force Spell Catcher to react correctly to these words in the future.
Thesaurus
By default, the Thesaurus window displays not only synonyms, but also definitions, related words, antonyms, compared and contrasted words (Figure 6). Just like everything else in Spell Catcher, you can configure the thesaurus to suit your own needs.
Shorthand Glossary
Spell Catcher's shorthand glossary has two functions - expanding abbreviations and quietly correcting pre-defined typos. Spell Catcher automatically expands abbreviations into anything up to 1000 characters, and is pre-configured to correct a range of common typos, such as 'teh' and 'adn'.
A nice touch is the inclusion of special abbreviations which
automatically expand into the current time or date. As with Spell Catcher's dictionaries, you can create
multiple glossaries and activate different glossaries in different programs. By default, Spell Catcher checks
dictionaries before glossaries, but you can override this order either globally or in specific programs.
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Text Manipulation
Spell Catcher includes a range of 'selection modules' which manipulate text in various ways, such as capitalising, converting to upper or lower case, or changing spaces to tabs. If you routinely apply a series of these operations, you can save them as a macro and assign a hot key so you can invoke them quickly when needed.
Assessment
Spell Catcher has so many options that it took some time to get it working just the way I liked. Once I'd done that, it worked great, except for one beef - the dictionaries include both British and American spellings. Consequently, Spell Catcher doesn't react to words such as 'humor' and 'labor', and blithely offers both British and American spellings in its Suggestions window. You can overcome these problems by adding the 'mis-spelt' words to a negative dictionary, but this is a time-consuming hassle with plenty of room for error. Despite the supposedly bipartisan nature of the dictionaries, they have a definite American bias - words such as 'recognize' are included but not 'recognise'. There is hope, however - the next version of Spell Catcher will be released with 8 language dictionaries, one of which is British English.
Spell Catcher doesn't discriminate between text and non-text applications, so you might find yourself being asked if you want it to monitor your calculator or screen saver! That's a minor quirk, though.
According to the manual, some programs may experience occasional minor glitches with Spell Catcher, such as loss of formatting after correcting a mis-spelt word. Also, since Spell Catcher reacts to a word only after you press the space bar or tab key, you may find that if you jump around in a document (e.g. to retype part of a word or add something to an existing word), it may not correctly understand the word you were typing. If you find this a constant problem, some strategic fiddling with Spell Catcher's settings can minimise the effects.
I liked Spell Catcher and I liked its extensive customisability. I liked having a thesaurus so close at hand and being able to use the same dictionaries and the same shorthand glossaries across multiple applications. The biggest dampener to my enthusiasm is Spell Catcher's lack of a British-English dictionary - but that will be remedied in future releases.
Cost and Availability
US$29.95 for electronic version; US$39.95 for physical product. Purchase from http://www.casadyg.com.
Minimum System Requirements
Windows 95 or Windows NT. CD-ROM drive
Reprinted from the February 2000 issue of PC Update, the magazine of Melbourne PC User Group, Australia
