RevMedia

EasySpell is a spelling checker written by Steve Hilson the gentleman responsible for "Willy Worm" on the last diskette. It is designed to be hooked into any text prompt (or run from TCL) and features a dictionary of 60,000+ (UK English) words. The pricing has not yet been finalised so contact Steve Hilson for details.

The installation routine is straightforward and refreshingly makes use of DRV.READY to check whether a disk is in the floppy drive, thus eliminating those annoying "Drive A: not ready" messages. Once installed, EasySpell is added to a prompt by adding a call to a routine to the F2 code and command. Then when the user presses F2 a display appears telling them of the progress through the spell checking.

The spell checker was checked on a text field containing 8,984 bytes with 1,553 words. It took 108 seconds to complete the spell check - assuming a 5 letter word (standard for measuring typing speed) this means that the software checked about 15 words per second. This was on a networked 386 machine.

If a word is not found the user is offered the choice of adding the word to the dictionary, correcting the mistake, ignoring the word or choosing from a list of "metafones" - sound alikes. The manual is straightforward, the software is simple. The initial installation experienced a number of problems centring around the authors choice of AREV ROS files as the file structure but once the files had been remade these problems (encountered on a low memory machine) went away.

Stephen Edward Hilson 2 Manor Lane, Old Basing, Hampshire, RG24 0DG, England Telephone (011) 44 (0)256 810343