Important - Please Read: This version of MicroSpell differs significantly from previous non-Windows versions, and from other spell checkers that you might have used. Like other spell checkers, MicroSpell can show you (and let you deal with) one suspect at a time. However, unlike other spellers, MicroSpell gives you a second way to view and deal with suspect words: all at once, as a list. This list—called the Inbox—enables you to skip past or give commands that apply to entire groups of suspects at once. You might have to spend a bit of time learning to use the Inbox effectively, but it can save you a lot more time in the long run, especially if your documents typically have many suspects because you only have to deal with the actual errors.
The demo text will acquaint you with basic spell checking features that are useful whether you check your text one-word-at-a-time or use the Inbox. While you can use MicroSpell just like any other spell checker (by ignoring the Inbox), to get the most out of the program we recommend you read the Simple and Efficient Spell Checking topic (use Help | Show How To), and work through the demo (use Help | Show Demo). The "How To" and demo text give you step-by-step instructions while the rest of this document gives a concise overview.
You can reload this document anytime by using the Show Welcome Text command on the Help menu.
Notes:
The Inbox
Suspect Grouping
Suspect Coloring
The Outbox
Getting Help
When you check a document, the Inbox and a related "Outbox" (below) will appear on your screen outside of the speller's main edit window—i.e. the window you are looking at now. (You can think of this as Notepad or WordPad with a spell checker attached.) The Inbox contains a list of all of the unrecognized words in the current document. Note: if instead of the Inbox, you see MicroSpell's Spell Check dialog, you can press the Show List button to switch to the Inbox.
With the Inbox, MicroSpell aims to solve a problem that affects all other spell checkers that we know of: you must respond to every unrecognized word with at least one mouse click or keystroke, sometimes several. For a large document, this can mean hundreds of slow, deliberate keystrokes or clicks. MicroSpell, on the other hand, requires only that you respond to misspellings—typically many fewer responses. You can deal with other suspects in groups, or not at all. This might not feel natural at first if you're accustomed to giving a command for every suspect word, but it can really make things easier, especially when there are many suspects. When you have finished correcting the misspellings, you can simply press one of the Done buttons to close the Inbox and save the document, even if the Inbox still contains many suspect words.
To make it easier to spot errors, the Inbox can group similar suspects: all suspects containing non-letters appear together, suspects with irregular capitalization form another group, repeated words make up another category, etc. You can tell immediately from the category icon which group the suspect belongs to. (All icons have tooltip help to remind you of the meaning.) If you see only light grey square icons, you can click the Suspect sort button once to group the suspects by category. To reduce visual clutter, (most) category icons are hidden unless the suspects are ordered by category. However, the "repeated word" and "known misspelling" icons are never hidden.
In addition to the automatic grouping that occurs when you sort by Suspect, MicroSpell has another set of grouping functions that you can invoke manually. When there are many suspects, you'll find that these functions, in conjunction with Suspect Coloring (below), help you separate the true misspellings from the false alarms. There are quite a few ways to group suspects. For example, if your document contains many "words" with underscores, "Such_As_This," you can quickly separate them from the other suspects, visually check the spelling by word color, then select and accept all of them nearly as easily as you would a single suspect. To easily apply these grouping commands, click the grey square icon next to a suspect and the speller will group and automatically select that and similar suspects. If the word whose icon you clicked can be grouped in several ways, continue to click the same icon to step through the various groupings. If you do not see the light grey icons next to the suspects, click the context column button to sort by document position.
If you need to correct a few misspellings among the grouped suspects before accepting of saving the rest, you will find that doing so cancels the overall selection. However, the speller will remember which suspects were selected and display a small button on the Inbox title bar that enables you to easily reselect the suspects so you can deal with them as a group.
Grouping commands are most useful when there are many suspects; there is little point in using them if you can easily visually check the Inbox list.
MicroSpell helps you spot errors by coloring the suspects to show which words or parts of words the speller has recognized. In general, known words or parts are colored green or black. Unknown words or parts are colored red. For example, "NationsBank" is rendered as NationsBank while "BancOne" appears as BancOne. Suspects that are recognized as a correctly spelled base word with a prefix and/or suffix attached are shown like this: hypertriglyceridemic. This can be a great help when visually scanning the Inbox, but you have to be careful because it's possible to have a misspelling colored without using red. If you want to know the meaning of a particular color in the Inbox, right click on it and use the Colors - Describe or Change command.
The Outbox keeps a complete history of how you dealt with every suspect word. It also shows suspects that the speller has auto-accepted, such as URLs, email addresses, and other things that are unlikely to be true misspellings. When you deal with a suspect in the Inbox or Spell Check dialog, it disappears and reappears in the Outbox. Suspects in the Outbox have different category icons (by default) that suggest the command that brought them to the Outbox. As in the Inbox, you can group by category icon so, for example, you can see all of the corrections you made displayed together. You'll probably use the Outbox for four main tasks: to undo commands, to review your corrections in context, to review auto-accepted suspects when you want to be particularly careful, and to augment your user dictionaries.
You can undo the Inbox or Spell Check dialog command (and its side effects) that brought a particular suspect or group of suspects to the Outbox by selecting it (them) and pressing the Undo button. To add Outbox suspects to a user dictionary, select them and use the pop-up menu Save command or just drag them to the Dictionaries dialog and drop them on the appropriate user dictionary icon.
The speller's documentation is HTML based, so you'll need a browser to view it properly. If you are looking for help on a particular dialog or menu, use the help button in that dialog or the "question mark" icon in the title bar to go directly to the topic. If you are seeking information on a menu item, highlight it and press the <F1> key. For a list of common Inbox keyboard and mouse shortcuts, display the drop-down menu on the Inbox Help button. If you need additional dictionary assistance and you are connected to the Internet, you can use MicroSpell's Web Lookup command available on the right mouse button pop-up menu in most speller windows.
![[Trigram Systems Contact Info]](img/Hlinesec.gif){kind=small}
Home | Features | Download | Register | Support | More |