Conference hydra::amiga_v1

2461.0. "ISPELL" by POLAR::GOSLING (Think KANATA INC.) Mon Apr 10 1989 11:17

       Anyone looking for a reasonable spelling checker, should take a
       look at ISPELL on FF191 (see 2176.29 for pointer - thanks Steve!).
       
       It is not dissimilar to DECSpell, highlighting the misspelled word
       and giving you a list of potential correct spellings.  You can
       edit the word, skip it, save it to a personal dictionary, or
       replace it with one of the offered words.
       
       Another nice thing about it, is that it works great with SEDT, in
       a similar fashion to DECSpell - spawns a subprocess, checks the
       spelling of a copy of the document contained in the current
       buffer, and upon completion replaces the document in the buffer
       with 'spell checked' copy.  I am editing and AMIGA'izing Dick
       Danek's .WPS key and help files (coming to a theatre near you soon
       - I wish we would get a rainy weekend) and I simply changed the
       command 'tied' to GOLD <F8> to call ISPELL (instead of SPELL) and
       away we went.
       
       A couple of other things about ISPELL.
       
       1) It consumes mucho memory.  The dictionary alone is >500k and if
          I'm not mistaken loads up in its entirety when you run ISPELL.
       
       2) The doc's on the FF disk indicate that a hashed version of the
          dictionary exists - "simply put ISPELL in a directory and
          ISPELL.HASH in sys:s".  I couldn't find the hashed dictionary
          so had to make one by running a supplied utility called
          buildhash (I think the doc's say to run makehash which I
          couldn't find) on the provided dictionary file.  I tried
          building the dictionary in ram, but ran out of memory, so ended
          up building it on a hard drive partition - which worked fine,
          but was slower.  By the way I have a 2.5 meg A1000.
       
       If #2 causes anyone any pain, I can create an arc of the hashed
       dictionary and post it.
       
       Art