nisus.com

I've been looking at spell checking recently and wondering why it can't be made better. (I know there is a real answer to that along the lines of Apple finds it more profitable to mess with fal-de-lals like 'faces' in iPhoto rather than work tools like a better dictionary/spell checking function.)

What I am thinking of is a spell checker that regarded words spelt correctly as possibly incorrect so that when you clicked on them you would get a menu of words that might be the right one in context. An example is "form" and "from". I occasionally type "form" when I mean to type "from". NWP doesn't mark it as an error -- and fair enough too, it could only do that by viewing it in context and then we would be talking about bloaty, drowned-10-times cadavers like the cows we are seeing in the current Queensland floods, clagging up our sweet NWP app.

BUT if I spot the offending word, I would be most grateful to be able to click on it then insert a correction from a list, as we can do with most typos that result in a non-word. The advantage of this, of course, is that it would not require the typo producing typist to type in a correction -- and possibly repeat the typo. Or am I the only person in the world who "corrects" typos with typos?

So when I type "tine" instead of "time" I would like NWP's spelling checker to offer me a bunch of possible replacements. In this case, that list might include time, tune, tame, tome, tone, and rime.

I don't see a feature like this taking a lot of processing power.

Kind regards

Geoffrey Heard
Business writer, Editor, Publisher
The Worsley Press

greenmorpher wrote:
What I am thinking of is a spell checker that regarded words spelt correctly as possibly incorrect so that when you clicked on them you would get a menu of words that might be the right one in context. An example is "form" and "from". I occasionally type "form" when I mean to type "from". NWP doesn't mark it as an error -- and fair enough too, it could only do that by viewing it in context and then we would be talking about bloaty, drowned-10-times cadavers like the cows we are seeing in the current Queensland floods, clagging up our sweet NWP app.

BUT if I spot the offending word, I would be most grateful to be able to click on it then insert a correction from a list, as we can do with most typos that result in a non-word. The advantage of this, of course, is that it would not require the typo producing typist to type in a correction -- and possibly repeat the typo. Or am I the only person in the world who "corrects" typos with typos?

So when I type "tine" instead of "time" I would like NWP's spelling checker to offer me a bunch of possible replacements. In this case, that list might include time, tune, tame, tome, tone, and rime.

Geoffrey Press

Essentially, if I read correctly, you want the functionality of Spell Catcher X within NWP. I would agree. Except Spell Catcher does that, and it is available for all applications already.

Just tried it, exegete, and it didn't produce alternatives for correctly spelt words. I even read the relevant parts of the manual ...

Cheers, geoff

Ah, so more of an extension of a Thesaurus of sorts for correctly spelled words, but functioning like Spell Catcher (list produced where each one can be selected by using a number). Okay, I think I see the difference. Yes, that would be handy.

If I got it right, you want to mark words that are correct but that are likely to be “your” typos. I encounter the same problem with OCR docs. I know that the application misreads he for be or the other way around, or I for 1, or Garner for Gamer, and such things. That said, I can’t point out a solution. Not one that I know. I make a mental list of all the possible mistakes and hound them cop-like. I suppose you do the same.

Greetings, Henry.

For personal typos, I have just begun to use Typinator -- I had Ti4M since the beginning of time but the latest versions seems to run too slow for my typing and/or get tangled up in NWP (or whatever!).

In addition NWP has its own corrections set-up which works well -- but it is not universal. I want one which gives me the same corrections in NWP, Canvas, Firefox, Eudora, etc. (not really "etc." -- that's about it? ).

Typinator and NWP point the way with a bunch of ready made corrections for typos -- Typinator has a list of 2300 words from 'TidBITS'. I have those on auto-correct.

The next step would be to extend that beyond the non-words into the real words arena. These would NOT be auto-correct but would be available if you right-clicked on the word. You would start with typos that resulted in real words from a missed key or from keys round the right keys, e.g. I typed "rally" instead of "really", and "bout" instead of "about" above (I often miss "a" by not hitting the key hard enough, or hit the caps lock key instead of it; I think because I injured my left little finger a while back so I learned to protect it a little or I haven't got quite the same functionality in it that I used to have). Then there would be homonyms. What else? I would see this as being equipped with a learning function so that it could learn the words you made mistakes on and the words you actually meant to use. Heavens, if a humble, $10 phone (by LG, bugger this iPhone deVICE nonsense) can learn the words you text, why can't a $2000 computer do the same?

Maybe you could chose to auto-correct some of these errors and leave others, less often occurring, to be corrected manually. it could even mark those words you tended to get wrong that needed manual correct, even though the spelling was correct, because you had them in your list.

Best regards

Geoffrey Heard
The Ad-Doctor-Online
http://www.ad-doctor-online.com