on 28/4/2001 1:23 PM, Michael Evans at michael.evans@... wrote: > Has anyone on the list researched adding a spell-checking to FB > applications? Yes > Presumably, if the text to be spell checked is in an FB edit field, first a > list of words must be extracted from the edit field not necessarily. You can do it as you go. > second a list of unique > words must be extracted from the first list and third the list of unique > words must be compared to a dictionary. > > The tricky parts would be (a) constructing a useful/comprehensive dictionary Done. > and (b) optimizing the three steps above for speed... If you're checking as you go, the Mac can look up and check the word while you're pressing keys. It does it so fast that you don't notice it. > Would I be correct in defining words (in a handle, for example,) as a > sequence of characters ending with (but not including) a space, except for > the last word which would end at the end of the handle. Punctuation > characters at the end of a word would be filtered out...? There are a whole host of ways of doing it. It all depends on your application. > Am I correct in suspecting that a useful 'conversational American English' > dictionary would not be that big (less than 32,000 'words')...? YSpeak has two dictionaries. One of 1,000, one of 25,000 With Jay's help, I'm just about to release ZSpeak to Beta, and this will be followed by EZSpeak. Both programs learn from your typing, and use a trainable "next word" lookup. This latter feature is a great use of Jay's Alphabetic Continuum, and is amazingly powerful. For example, EZSpeak will try and guess what you're typing and predict not only your current word (from the Dictionary) but also the next word (from Jay's engine) as well. If you like the guess, you just hit the Tab key. If you don't, you just keep on typing. You can use the YSpeak dictionary now, downloadable from Staz's site. If you can't work out how it's held, your programming skills probably aren't good enough for you to use it. If you use it, please credit YSpeak and provide a Web link. I plan to make YSpeak, ZSpeak, and EZSpeak fully open source. If anyone would like to help in any way, please drop me an eMail. I you haven't read about YSpeak, do so on Staz's site first. Phil.