Re: Corpora: spellcheckers

Lingua Systems (LinguaSy@her.forthnet.gr)
Wed, 22 Oct 1997 22:37:59 +0300 (EET DST)

Jean Hudson wrote:

>The purpose of using your own dictionary and only your own dictionary
>is so that you can check a file against a restricted vocabulary list,
>a common requirement in ELT books. Obviously, it is not too difficult
>a programming task to write a program to check every word in a file
>(especially if it is a plain text file), but why reinvent the wheel
>if programs already exist? And ideally, the spellchecking program
>would work seamlessly within your word processor while working on the
>file.

On solution, which I have used, is to create a list of "allowed" words in a
text file and then construct a Word macro which can be added to the
menu/toolbar of word.

This macro takes each word from your document and checks it against the word
list. If the word is not found it is then marked in some way in the main
text (e.g. by turning it bright bold red).

Very simple and, although not amazingly fast with longer documents & word
lists, very effective.

__________________________________________

Sean Sutton
Lingua Systems software
http://www1.btwebworld.com/LinguaSy
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