Another use for batch spelling

[TBaehr@xxxxxxxx]

Even if you don't normally do batch spelling, here's a way to use it that
might save your skin someday:
My father-in-law wrote an autobiography, in longhand. My wife and I typed it
up as an 80th birthday present to him. In his book Hans mentions many names
of places and people -- he got around, and he knew a lot of people!

Through typing errors, and because of his handwriting and his own
inconsistency in remembering the spelling of place names, the manuscript had
some inconsistencies. Because these were all proper names, many of them
would show up in a spell check, but only one at a time.

Batch spelling to the rescue! I ran the MS through Xy4's batch spell checker
and got an alphabetized list of all words not found. The list included,
naturally, many or most of the personal and place names. It was then an easy
matter to see names with variant spellings and verify which spelling was the
correct one.

You could extend this notion. Say you normally work with a specialized
vocabulary, to the point that spell-checking is a real pain in the neck. In
interactive mode, you get beeped one or more times per sentence. In
autospell mode, your train of thought is constantly interrupted. Over the
months, you could respond to each interruption by adding the offending words
to your personal dictionary, but that's a pain, too.

So here's what you do: get a long, technical document in your field and batch
spell-check it. The resulting list, cleaned up, can go directly into your
generic personal spelling list; or you can create a new specialized list to
be loaded just for this type of document. You could do this with several
documents, or you could download a glossary in your field from the Internet
and batch-spell that. Obviously, you woould need to do some cleanup of the
lists, but in an hour or two you can create a very creditable list.

Tim Baehr
tbaehr@xxxxxxxx