Re: speeling woze

["Jonathan Beard" jbeard@xxxxxxxx]

On Thu, 22 Oct 1998 07:55:48 -0400, James D. Besser wrote:

>Xy4 and Signature have some big differences. The biggest: the speller and
>thesaurus in Signature were the abominations inserted by IBM. After using
>Sig for a few weeks I deinstalled and went back to Xy 3+. Xy4 restored the
>good Microlytics speller, and all was serene.

After using Xy 3.54 happily for many years, I was induced, last year,
to buy Xy 4 by the reigning wisemen on this list. I was having two
problems related to my work. First, 3 was refusing to load my huge
pers.spl dictionary of added words, and second, I was unable to get a
dir of my files in a couple of my really big directories. In both
cases, I was "out of memory" due to what I believe are old problems
with 3, despite the fact that using OS/2 and having a system with 40
megs, I have lots of memory.

But I am not at all happy with the "good Microlytics speller" in 4.
I am poorly coordinated and have to either look at the kbd or look at
the screen, or both, as I type. My fingers for sure do not know
where any of the shift or function keys are. So I usually do not
capitalize words, and have let the speller catch them and change
them. This worked well with 3. Since I work as a hack translator,
translating about 10,000 words from German, Spanish, Portuguese,
Dutch, Danish, etc. every month, mostly newspaper and magazine
articles, I encounter a lot of words I need to add to my
pers.spl--such as Milosevic--and far more that I want to use F3 to
add to the temp dictionary, such as the names of towns in Kosovo.
They are capitalized, of course. So I type them in the first time,
correctly, and then type them all lc for the rest of the article.
But in 4 this does not work. I had a man's name--Steinbach--in an
article on Sarajevo. I added it to temp and then typed it in as
steinbach. But the 4 speller encountered it and suggested:

Stalingrad, stalinism, stalinistic, stearate, Steinbach......

Whereas the 3 speller would have given me the Steinbach as the only
suggestion--which means just one keystroke to correct it.

So. Which is the easiest option: change to the 3 speller within 4?
fiddle RAM in OS/2 settings to fool Xy 3 to accept my big pers.spl?
Or, is there some way to make the 4 speller, which has some nice
features, less perverse?

Jonathan
Jonathan D. Beard
Science Writer-Photo Researcher
 820 West End Ave 3B
NY, NY 10025-5328 tel: (212) 280-2798
jbeard@xxxxxxxx