Spell checking is a luxury that just about every user of anything that involves sitting over a keyboard wants access to. I wrote PocketPad in Delphi, and there are spell checkers for sale that I could drop in. But the operative words are "for sale." But do not despair. Options proliferate.

I think I pointed out in a Help topic or possibly in Disknote that, since the first tool on the Tools menu is a "toolbox" for running any program that will run in the Windows version in which you are running PocketPad, you could run even a high powered word processor like Winword. First, Click the Edit menu. Click or key Copy All. This will select your whole text, copy it to the Clipboard and deselect it. You won't know anything has happened, but it's out there. Now, open Winword and paste the text. Run the spell check, make corrections, and then select all, put it back onto the Clipboard, and paste it back into PocketPad. I didn't give all this detail explicitly, but what to do is pretty clear.

I didn't do this. I had an OLD (1985) IBM DOS based spell checker called Wordproof with a 129KB dictionary and an any-size user created supplement. And I've gone on using that. But I checked with Winword so I can assure you that, though using the default font, Winword keeps and passes back line-ends and all.

But recently, some text editors have started including spell checking. In Windows 95, for instance, Exchange's Compose Message does. You might be more comfortable using that or the Compose in other mailers that have spell checking now than using a word processor where you have to sweat any "export" twists. Internet Mail (with Internet Explorer) also has spell checking. For familiarity of the look as you pass a file back and forth via Clipboard, set these editors to Courier New and 10 point. I keep my Eudora Lite font at that setting, too.

One of my Tools menu items IS Mailer. In doing email, of course, I use that Copy All and, then, bring up the mailer, hit New Message, and paste the text. My Eudora lite doesn't have spell checking. So I guess I can use Exchange's Compose for the spell check, return, drop the text in my file, start the mailer and drop it in there, too. A single process. Incidentally, the Copy All is on the right mouse button, too. That's in Windows 95 OR Windows 3.1.

Gene Fowler