This is release 3.0.2 of Excalibur, June 18, 2000
Excalibur is a freeware spelling checker for the Macintosh that is
also LaTeX aware.
Features include:
- Excalibur will offer suggestions for how to correct a word.
- Excalibur can spell check the clipboard. This makes it a good
spelling checker for any text based application such as Alpha or
SimpleText.
- Excalibur also works with Eudora Pro, BBEdit, MT NewsWatcher,
Communicate, Nisus Writer, AppleWorks (formerly ClarisWorks),
WordPerfect, and any other program that supports Word Services.
- You can teach it about new LaTeX commands and environments that you
define.
- You can create your own dictionaries.
- Works on any plain TEXT file. (type TEXT)
- Works on formatted files via Word Services.
- You will need System 7.1 or higher, a Power Macintosh, and the
Appearance Manager to run Excalibur.
Version 2.6 of Excalibur is still available too. It will run on
System 6.0.5 or greater, and it will run on any Macintosh since the
Mac Plus.
- There is balloon help.
- The "Standard Dictionary" (American English) distributed with
Excalibur has over 162,000 words.
- Dictionaries for atomic elements, biblical terms, biomedical terms,
British English, Catalan, Danish, Dutch (both old and new
spellings), French, German, HTML, Indonesian, Italian, life
sciences, Manx Gaelic, medical terms, Norwegian, Portuguese,
Spanish, and Swedish are available. You can get these from
.
- If you're not a LaTeX user, you can get a copy of the manual in
PostScript, HTML or Acrobat Reader (PDF) format from
.
There is also an on-line HTML version of the manual. Point your
browser to
You can also get to the on-line version of the manual through
Excalibur's Help menu.
- If you want to receive mail notifying you when the next version of
Excalibur will be available, let me know. I will add you to my
mailing list. Send mail to and please
include a valid e-mail address.
You can also learn about current Excalibur versions by visiting the
Excalibur home page:
New Features in version 3.0.2:
- Added about 500 words to the Standard Dictionary. Most are proper
names. The dictionary now contains 162,459 words. This is version
2.2 of the Standard Dictionary.
- Single clicking on a suggestion copies it to the Change To: box.
Double clicking makes the change.
Bugs Fixed:
- Fixed the dialog that warns of an old version of the Appearance Manager.
It needed to be a bit larger.
- Fixed a URL parsing bug. Excalibur would sometimes think that a
left curly brace was part of a URL. As a result, you would get a
LaTeX parsing error.
- Words that contain a long Hungarian umlaut are now added to the
dictionary properly.
- Excalibur will run with a monitor that displays just black and
white.
- Increased the size of the tabs in the preferences dialog.
- Excalibur no longer becomes unresponsive for 60 seconds after trying
to open a locked file.
- User defined environment names may optionally end in an asterisk.
- Excalibur is more careful about declaring that user definitions are
dirty.
- Use the new icon and file type for emacs files.
Rick Zaccone
zaccone@bucknell.edu