A Better Spellchecker

Writing a better spellchecker may be akin to building a better mousetrap; after all, doesn’t everyone already have one?

While virtually every commercial wordprocessing and layout package includes a spellchecker, there is nonetheless room for improvement. A pleasant surprise in this regard was to discover MicroSpell, a jewel of a spell-checker. This DOS-based spellchecker (US$59)is better designed and far more versatile than any spellchecker currently on the market. MicroSpell can handle contractions and possessives, various types of formatting tags, including LaTeX, and offers both user and document-specific dictionaries as well as a main RAM-based dictionary, a secondary stop-word dictionary, and a disk-based expanded lexicon containing more than 230,000 words, including scientific terms and obcure English words. Up to five dictionaries can be used at once, with no loss in speed.
    According to Robert Lucas, the program’s author, MicroSpell has been through many incarnations since it first appeared in the late 1970s for CP/M computers, when it was the second commercial spellchecker on the market. Lucas acknowledges that the market for stand-alone spellcheckers is not what it used to be. He adds that a large percentage of his current customers are LaTeX users. Although the name of Lucas’s company, Trigram Systems, might suggest statistical techniques, Lucas says that this is not the case; it was chosen on a whim.

Trigram Systems, 5840 Northumberland St., Pittsburgh, PA 15217, USA; Tel: + 1 412 422 8976, Email: rnlucas@j.gp.cs.cmu.edu