Overview Xproofer

XProofer (XProof.exe) belongs to the next generation of text proofing  programs using 32 bits technology (WIN32). These programs run faster and  use memory more efficiently.

WIN32 programs will run under WINDOWS NT and WINDOWS 95.

XProofer makes use of the ANSI (ISO) Latin character set in order to support all diacritics present in the languages of the European Community.

Collating sequence corresponds with the selected language. The Nordic  lexicons (Swedish, Danish, Norwegian and Finnish) are processed according  to the NORDIC collating sequence treating å, ä, ö, ø, æ,  as separate vowels.

For the French and Italian language detection of elision will automatically be enabled.

How to use XProofer

Abbreviation files

History files for the top 10 of user errors

The Latin I Character Set for Windows

Tags or lay-out instructions

Scrolling in the main window

XProof.ini

The native language of XProofer

Changing the size of the characters.

How to improve the performance


How to use XProofer

If you run XProofer from a DOS-box you can specify the file to be processed by XProofer:

 DOS-PROMPT> xproof my_file

If you do not specify a file you have to open a file.

If you click on XProof or you run XProofer from the DOS-box, you will see  a menu bar with the following items:

 File   Process   Settings   Fonts   Language   Help

Each possibility contains several options.

The options under File are presented below:

File: Opening and Saving a Document

Process

Settings

Fonts

Language


File: Opening and Saving a Document

Open enables you to select files (default is: *.doc). After having selected  your file, the first page of 200 lines will partially be on the screen. The line length is limited by a wrap margin function which depends on the size of the WINDOW (see the initialization file "xproof.ini").

You use the scroll bars to view the text from the top to the bottom of the presented page.

If a previous document isn't saved, a message box asks Save file ?.

Save will store the correct file using the original name.

Save As allows you to select a name or to create a new name for the corrected file.

Next Page reads the subsequent page.

Rewind goes to the top of the file.

About shows the ABOUT dialogbox. This box also displays the version number.

Exit terminates and saves the history, but does not save the corrected file. If you wish to save the corrected text, you have always to click on Save or Save As.

If a previous document isn't saved, a message box asks Save file ?.

If the user has appended itmes to the user history, a message box asks Store the history?. If stored the new items can be used for subsequent spelling sessions.


Process

The options under Process are presented are:

 Spell Document   Spell Page   Spell Word   Document Restart    Page Restart   Edit   View Lexicon

Spell a Document, Page or Word

Edit a text

Lexicon View

Moving around through the text


Spell a Document, Page or Word

You can select Spelling per Document, per Pageor per Word. If you choose Spell Document or Spell Page your text will be spelled automatically from the beginning to the end: for Document your complete text and for Page your complete page. An error will be enlightened, the error appears in the editbox and alternatives appear in the dialog box (XProofer's alternatives). If checked from history is enabled a message box signals the proposed spelling correction. The history suggestion can be accepted (yes) or rejected (no). The history is only used for spelling per page or per document.

If all words of a large part of the document are correct, the initial page is not repainted by new pages, but the ongoing spelling process can be monitored from the moving vertical scrollbar.

 For Word you have to click on a word.  The word is enlightened against a black background: on and off which means the word is correct. If the word is not correct, the alternative dialog box appears and  you can now choose one alternative.

If you are not sure or if you are not satisfied with the alternatives you can click on > or >> for a second wider or elaborated  wider search. New alternatives are added to the list. You can click on the alternative you like. You can also edit the word in the editbox itself.

If you select the OK button the selected (correct) alternative is  copied into the text. If you select Cancel the word will not be corrected.  For the Document and Page mode the flow can be stopped by clicking Quit. Quit switches from Document or Page mode to Word mode. You can restart the Document of Page mode by selecting Restart. The Restart position is the Caret Position or any activated new cursor position.

If you have not clicked in the edit or list areas, you can use the keys  "o" or "O" for OK, "c" or "C" for Cancel and "q" or "Q" for Quit.

During the presentation of the alternative window the ESCAPE key is a hot  key for switching directly to the EDIT-MODE or the reverse.

Double words are detected and a Message Box asks for removing the doubled word  or not.


Edit a text

You can also Edit the text (add or remove a character before the caret bar).  Click on a character pointed out by the cursor. A caret bar will be shown. A caret is a vertical shaped line which is actually a text cursor(|). The cursor (|) can be moved to any position. The position can be pointed by a left mouse click, at any position  in the word. Characters can be inserted at the cursor position or  removed by the BACKSPACE or DELETE key.

If you are in the middle of spelling a text, you can press ESC to switch to the EDIT mode. The previous spelling process is continued after a second  ESC key push or it is continued after clicking on Page Restart or  Document Restart in the process menu. However, editing during switching between spelling and edit mode should be done carefully. You might alter the position of words which are to be spelled after you restart the spelling mode again.


Lexicon View

If you click on Lexicon View a dialog to be able to browse into the lexicon will be shown. A part of word plus wildcards can be entered into the editbox.  Pushing on the button Search starts the process of browsing into the lexicon. The use of Lexicon View is disabled during Document or Page mode, but during  Word mode you can switch between the Select and Lexicon Dialog. During Document or Page mode you have to use "quit" to enable editing. You can restart the Document or Page mode from the cursor position. Lexicon View is not meant for reading the complete dictionary. If the pattern with wild characters in the edit box evokes a very long list only the first 500 words will be presented. It might be necessary to do a more accurate search by typing a more specified search pattern in the edit box.

The dialogs can be repositioned.


Moving around through the text

If the focus is on the main window the text can be scrolled.

The following keys can be used:

PAGE DOWN	the text below the bottom is scrolled into the window

PAGE UP	the text above the top is scrolled into the window,  but not more then the top of the current page

HOME	the text in top of the file is showed

ARROW UP	scrolling one line up, but not more then the current page

ARROW DOWN	scrolling one line down


Settings

The options under Settings are presented below:

Join Hyphens is a switch to enable or disable the joining of hyphenated words at the end of the text line. For most cases it is correct to remove the hyphen and join the two parts of the hyphenated word. For some cases this results in a spelling error which will be handled by the speller. This switch is meant for pages from a book which are scanned with an OCR  technique. If you do not enable Join Hyphens any spelling process is nearly impossible.

Text means normal ascii, troff and *Talo. For any mode the hyphen is part of the word. Therefore "re-sort" differs from "resort". The first case is considered to be one word and will not be split up into two words. If you do so you miss errors like "re-source", whereas XProofer doesn't.

Text/Digits are an intermediate between Text and OCR.

OCR is for texts that have been OCR scanned. The word "jazzconcert" might be spelled as "jaz7.concert" and in this mode  will be recognized as an error which should be corrected into "jazzconcert".

These Text Styles define the characteristics of a word.

Enable Abbreviations is clicked on if a word might be an abbreviation. The abbreviation word list is an ASCII word list which can be edited by the user. The storage size is 18000 characters. The actual storage is equal to the file size plus the number of lines. If the word is not abbreviated the main lexicon is used to find possible alternatives.

Set Accuracy is used for setting a critical percentage of fuzzy distance  between the erroneous word and an alternative. It was fixed in the MS-DOS  version, but for WINDOWS the user can set an optimal level for passing  through relevant alternatives. For OCR a lower accuracy level might be needed to enable alternatives for heavy corrupted texts. Do not set Set Accuracy to 100%!

Checked to History enables you to check words which are sent to the history. You can prevent errors to enter into the history file. If this option is not enabled you are invited to check for short words. A message dialog will ask you to include the word in the history or not.

Checked from History enables you to accept word replacements from the history. A message dialog will display the word in the text and the replacement suggested by the history and ask to accept the suggestion or not. This option is needed if authors wish to prevent  replacements in some text sections written in an old or another spelling  form. If Checked from History is disables all replacements automatically occur.

Word length not checked evokes a menu with the word lengths of 1, 2 or 3.

Words exceeding a length of 1, 2 or 3 will not be checked. You can skip very short words in case 2 or 3 letter words might be  abbreviations. The user can enable a second correction session in which he enables the abbreviation checking mechanism. For that case he should set the minimum word length not checked to 1.

Check citation enables a visual control for citation and parentheses  balancing. Opening and closing of the citation marks and parentheses is  visualized by underlining the section in different colors. Large underlined sections of several text lines usually signal  an unbalanced state. The citations can be checked during spelling checking or during viewing the document. Incorrect citation marks can be edited (see Process section Edit). Since different languages use different citation styles a style can be  selected, e.g. English, Dutch, French, German, Swedish, and Spanish. Other languages agree with one of these styles. Categories are: typewriter quotes ("), single and double quotes according to the rules of a language, opening and closing guillemots according to the rules of a language and the balancing of brackets, parentheses, etc.

The visual citation checking system supports nesting.

Unbalanced citations are marked with a RED rectangular block at the end of the underlined section. This mark implies an error for most cases, except for signaling cases in a text such as: a) a first case and b) a second case. It is assumed that balancing will be closed in 4 lines. If a citation or parenthesis is only opened several lines will be underlined and marked with the RED flag.  An initial citation mark or parenthesis should be preceded by a word separator, usually a space, or by another citation mark from a different category. A final close of a citation or parenthesis should be separated  from the next word with a punctuation character or a space. This treatment forces a correct usage of citation marks and all types of  brackets.

An example:

error: this should be"named".

correct: this should be "named".


Fonts

By default the program uses the System font.  You can choose any font available on your system by selecting the menu item Fonts. After having choosen a new font the system will remember this font until the next session.  Under Fonts you will find:

The Font Select item presents the Font Dialog Box. You can select a certain typeface, a style, and the size of the font. The usual type faces are: "Arial", "Times New Roman", "Courier". These truetype fonts have some extra characters in their character set such as the ligature OE.

For WINDOWS NT you can also choose the Eastern European and Turkish fonts. You have to install these fonts in advance (select Control Panel,  Fonts and Add). You can view the available characters with the Character Map in the  Accessories group.

For Old Greek you can demonstrate the font change by selecting the SYMBOL character set. Even if you have selected the language British English, words are demonstrated in old Greek characters, also in the alternative and lexicon list boxes. These Greek characters are simply mapped to [A-Z] and [a-z].

The default font is restored after pressing the item Default Font.

The font settings are stored in an initialization file for the next text  proofing session.


Language

The option Language is self explaining. If a lexicon is not present the  language will never be enabled, but the user is warned to select a new  language.

New languages can be installed with the installation program "installs.exe" on the installation disk. You will also need the lexicon disk for the new language.

 During spelling you can switch between languages. If you are in the middle of the spelling process you have to press on the ESC key. Thereafter, you can select a new language from the language Menu. A second ESC press will continue the original spelling process.

 Lexicon base file names:

 Dutch         _ned

 Dutch-96      _ned96

 Dutch-P       _ned_p

 Br.English    _english

 Am.-English   _america

 German        _german

 Swiss-German  _swiss

 French        _french

 Spanish       _spanish

 Catalan       _catalan

 Italian       _ital

 Ib.Portuguese _portg

 Brazilian     _braz

 Swedish       _svensk

 Danish        _danish

 Norwegian     _norsk

 Ny Norsk      _nynorsk

 Finnish       _finnish

 Greek         _greek

Some lexicons are under development. Please, inform about their status.


Abbreviation files

Abbreviations are stored into abbreviation files. These files are named "language_identifier.abb", for example the Dutch abbreviation file is called "_ned.abb". Abbreviation files are ascii files. You can look into them and edit them by  using any text editor, e.g. windows notepad.exe. For diacritical characters  you need the Windows Latin 1 character set (the ISO-standard).

 Examples of abbreviations

 American English    British English    French

 A.B.                A/C                Acea

 a.c.                a/c                AD

 A.D.                AA                 AFEP

 a.d.                AB                 AFP

 a.m.                AC/DC              c.-à-d.


History files for the top 10 of user errors

The system contains two kind of histories: the protected history and the user history. They are usually located in the lexicon directory (for set ispel=c:\spell  and set history=c:\spell).

The protected history is connected to the ispel variable and the user history is connected to the history variable. If you have two different projects you can connect each of them to its own history variable. The current directory should be set as: set history=.\. For Dutch the protected history is called: _history.nl, and the user history is called: history.nl. The size of the protected history consists of 1200 record maximal. The non-used protected records can be added to the user history, therefore, the size of the user history will be limited to 2400 records minus the size of the protected history.

 The history acts like a human memory, it rehearses items which occur  frequently and it forgets items which are not used anymore.

Each history record consists of a number the correct word and optionally  the erroneous word. If the optional erroneous word is present automatic  correction occurs. The items of the history will be capitalized if an initial  capital is found or if a complete word is in uppercase, e.g.  once the correction "houze" to "house is stored in the history "houze"  is corrected to "house", "Houze" to "House" and "HOUZE" will be corrected  to "HOUSE". Any other uppercase character will be treated as a specific case.

Some top-10 errors for American-English are given below:

 "_history.usa"

 300 abscess abcess

 300 acknowledgment acknowledgement

 300 aggressive aggresive

 300 ceiling cieling

 300 coffee cofee

 300 donkey donky

 300 explicit explisit

 300 foreclose forclose

 300 impersonal inpersonal

 300 enrich inrich

Correct words which are not found in the main lexicon are also collected by the history function, among them abbreviations like company names. However, it is more efficient to move abbreviations into the abbreviation files (*.abb), unless a change in spelling is neccessary (300 NAVO NATO).

 Differences between American-English and British-English spelling can also be inserted in the history.

The protected history is by default loaded in the directory set by the  environment variable ISPEL, the user history is loaded in the directory set by environment  variable HISTORY. If HISTORY is not defined the current work directory is used to store the user history.

 set HISTORY=c:\spell

 or

 set HISTORY=.\   (current directory)


The Latin I Character Set for Windows

The Windows Character Set agrees with the UNICODE Latin I character set. Every diacritic that is used for the vowels in the West European languages is present: the accent grave, the accent ague, the tilde, the dieresis, the ångström, the circumflex. Every special attribute like O-slash (Ø), thorn, Germandbls (ß) and  the ligatures Æ and OE are present.

More characters are available in the Windows character set  than in the Latin 1 set.  The System and Courier fonts use the Latin I set,  while Arial, Courier New, Lucida Console and  Time New Roman use the elaborated Windows character set.  The ligature OE only is present in the elaborated Windows Character Set. Present or not present the OE is recognized as a letter belonging to a word. For the System font, a bar will be printed instead of the characters OE and oe.

Depending on the style that you prefer either Dutch, English or French  citation marks can be used, but the elaborated characters set only includes all cases: ...


Tags or lay-out instructions

By default XProofer reads ASCII texts, texts using *TALO's markup language, and texts using the World Wid Web (WWW) HyperText Markup Language (HTML). Texts are frequently intermixed with tags or lay-out instructions. These lay-out instructions decrease the readability of a text, and therefore, the friendliness for a spelling/correcting process.

Therefore, tags / lay-out instructions are filtered from the text  wherever possible. Be sure that when your file is returned no tag is removed. Instead of a tag pattern, a block or a vertical line  is placed on the screen, indicating the location of the tag. This character (tag) cannot be removed, replaced or edited.

Tags differ from package to package.  Currently two type of markup languages are recognized: *Talo's own markup language used by *Talo's page lay-out systems and  the World Wid Web (WWW) HyperText Markup Language (HTML) format. *Talo's markup language is related to the troff format.

A *Talo's markup language is recognized by the very first line, which  starts with a period (.).

The next instructions are filtered converted to ansi characters:

 \fR \fB \fI \t \a \u \d

 \(:a \('a \(`a \(^a  etc.

 Note that diacritical signs preceed the target character.

The HTML format is recognized if the first line starts with a "<", as part of the very first formating instruction. This markup language defines an instruction by <command>. These instructions are temporary exchanged by a tag signal, a small rectangle.

Dedicated formats can optionally be defined. Please consult *TALO.

For some formats automatic language switching belongs to the possibilities.


Scrolling in the main window

With the Page-up and Page-down keys you can scroll your texts. A Page-down at the end of a screen page automatically evokes the next page. A page down can only reach the top of the current page (of 200 lines). The Home key rewinds the file.

During spelling the main window scrolls automatically to the first item to be handled. In the document mode page after page will be processed.


XProof.ini

The size and location of the window and its states and flags are stored in  the "xproof.ini" file.  Therefore, the user does not need to go along all options during the start of the program. For WINDOWS NT it is located in the directory: c:\WINNT35, for WINDOWS 3.1 it is located in c:\WINDOWS.

If one of the initialization items is missing the default value will be used.

 An example of the state is given below:

 [Xproofer]

 Screen=3 81 987 557 (The location and size of the window)

 Language=GB (The selected language)

 TextType=1  (The text type)

 JoinHyphens=-1 (disable join hyphens)

 Accuracy=71 (the accuracy level)

 CheckedToHistory=-1 (not checked to history)

 CheckedFromHistory=-1 (for unchecked replacements from history)

 CheckCitations=0 (do not check for citation errors)

 CriticalWordLength=1 (critical word length not checked)

 FontName=Times New Roman  (The selected font)

 FontParameters=-16 400 0 0 18  (the select font parameters)

 CurrentWorkDir=C:\users\jaapw\wins\doc


The native language of XProofer

The native language of XProofer can easily be changed by *TALO if you supply us with the terminology you wish to use.


Changing the size of the characters.

If you choose Fonts and if you enlarge the size of the characters part of the text can be obscured by the Alternative Dialog Box.  Enlarging the font does not change the wrap-margin. The correct wrap-margin is used for the Next Page or for a Rewind.


How to improve the performance

Your idiom probably differs from the idiom of other users. If you have a special profession you might use words never found in any dictionary. Some of these words might not be present in our the huge lexicons. Moreover, users always will create texts with a lot of  neologisms, personal names, geographical names, or even words from centuries ago, etc. This really not a problem for XPROOFER. If the spelling of these new words is correct, these words should be entered in the history by using the BUTTON OK !

 The history consists of two part: a) correct words and b) errors and there correction.

If a word is wrongly spelled it should be corrected in the alternative windows' editbox, either by selecting an item from the listbox, or by editing in the editbox itself. Once corrected the BUTTON OK will correct the word in the text and will also send the correction to the history.  Thereafter, a second identical mistake will be corrected automatically.

After you have saved the file and you have pushed on the BUTTON EXIT  the history should be up-dated!  Otherwise the additions to the private word list and corrections will be lost. If you EXIT or if you SWITCH between languages a message box will asked for history up-date (YES or NOT).

 The up-dating increases the quality of the history.  The number of items increase and increase up to a certain limit.  Probably it will take quite a long time to reach this limit. If the limit is reached an rehearsal and forgetting mechanism begins its watchdog function by strengthening important items and  by vanishing old items which were not used for quite a while. After some time the history contains very valuable items which describe with great accuracy your typical language usage and the history will improve the quality of spelling. It will also improve the speed of spelling. So up-date your history unless you are not sure about one or more accepted words. If an accidental error enters in to the history, you can edit the data base with the WINDOWS editor "notepad". An American history should be edited with:

notepad c:\spell\history.usa

 A Dutch history should be edited with:

 notepad c:\spell\history.nl

The format of the history is:

priority_number  correct_word [error_word]

The last item [error_word] is optional.

Please, look critically at XPROOFER.

 *TALO b.v.,

 Lijsterlaan 379,

 1403 AZ Bussum, NL.

 tel/fax:+31-2159 328 01  (before oct. 10th, 1995)

 tel/fax:+31-35 693 28 01  (after oct. 10th, 1995)