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- PC-SPELL By:Andy Wildenberg version 1.15; modified 11-04-84 by Ben Blackstock
- PC-SPELL is a dictionary oriented spelling checker. In its first version it
- will check small documents, about 1500 words or less dependent on memory.
- First you will be asked which drive you want for the PC-SPELL diskette. In DOS
- version 2.x, you may also specify paths. All drive names must at least include
- a letter and a colon, or you will be asked again for a name. Then you will be
- asked for the drive that the work diskette will be in. The same restrictions
- apply. If you have one drive and your PC-SPELL and work diskettes are
- different, then specify drive two different drives when prompted. A ram
- drive will increase speed greatly.
- A list of files will appear on the screen after drive specification
- and you will then choose the file to work on by typing in the name and
- pressing return. ALL FILES THAT ARE SPELL CHECKED SHOULD BE IN ASCII FORMAT.
- PC-SPELL will only spit the words back at you and possibly crash if they are
- in Word-Star or any other format besides ascii.
- Now the main loop begins. During all of this time there will be prompting
- on the screen telling you what's going on. First PC-SPELL takes the file
- and makes it into single words, storing them in memory. This step is followed
- by an annoying but impossible to avoid period while Basic clears out all of
- the excess memory. Third, PC-SPELL sorts the list of words in alphabetical
- order. In this step PC-SPELL tells you when it starts sorting and when it
- should be done. THIS TIME IS ONLY A ROUGH ESTIMATE AND IS OFTEN QUITE
- INACCURATE. Fourth it writes the sorted list to disk. This part is not
- prompted by the bottom line. Fifth, it gets rid of all duplicate words.
- Last, it compares your words to its dictionary, writing all of those that it
- doesn't find to the file `misspell'.
- The speed in which these steps occur varies greatly with the size of the
- document. Also, PC-SPELL will only work with the amount that can fit in
- memory, to avoid long disk reads and writes.
- Now comes your part. PC-SPELL's dictionary is quite limited at present, so
- a lot of words that are correct will still be written to misspell. You must
- take the words correctly spelled and write them to the file `UPDATE' while
- keeping the incorrect ones in the file `misspell'.
- Last of all, to add these words to the dictionary, run the program
- 'SORTDIC.BAS', while making sure that there is enough disk space to write the
- dictionary again. i.e. If the dictionary is 35,000 bytes long, then have about
- 40,000 bytes free on that disk drive.
- To correct the misspelled words, I suggest the following. Copy the file
- 'misspell' to the printer using the DOS command 'Copy misspell lpt1:'. Then
- enter you word processor and use the search and replace functions to find and
- correct all misspelled words. Then after saving the file and exiting the
- word-processor, your file should all be spelled correctly without error.
- The compiled versions are PC-SPELL.EXE in version 1.1 and SPELL.EXE in
- version 1.15. They each fun much faster than the BASIC versions. The BASIC
- versions are included for source code. Any modifications should be with a
- merge file for the BASIC version 1.15 and uploaded as a file to be merged with
- version 1.15. Uploads should be to HAWKEYE-PC, 319-363-3314.
- For more information, write to:
- Andy Wildenberg
- P.O. Box 443
- West Branch, Iowa
- 52358
-