DP Tool Club 31/CDASC_31_1996_juillet_aout.iso/vrac/tspell25.zip/TSPELL.INF

Text File | 1996-03-17 | 21KB | 451 lines

Sun 17-March-1996

About TSPELL in General                         All rights reserved
=======================

Apply question mark ? with the program call for a brief  description
of a program.

This package may be used and distributed freely for  NON-COMMERCIAL,
NON-INSTITUTIONAL,  PRIVATE  purposes, provided it is not changed in
any way. (Repacking with another method  is  ok,  though.)  For  ANY
other  usage,  such as use in a business enterprise or a university,
contact the author for registration. Uploading to bulletin boards is
encouraged.  Please  do  not  distribute  any  part  of this package
separately.

The programs are under development. If you have any comments or  bug
reports,   please  do  not  hesitate  to  use  electronic  mail  for
communication.

The author shall not be liable to the user for any direct,  indirect
or  consequential loss arising from the use of, or inability to use,
any program or file howsoever caused. No warranty is given that  the
programs will work under all circumstances.

Timo Salmi (email: [e-mail] WWW: http://uwasa.fi/~ts/)
Professor of Accounting and Business Finance
Faculty of Accounting & Industrial Management
University of Vaasa
P.O. BOX 700, FIN-65101 Vaasa, Finland


ABSTRACT:

TSPELL25        Checks English Spelling, T.Salmi
Filename        Comment
--------        --------------------------------
AUXIL.DNY       Seed (read the instructions)
FILE_ID.DIZ     Brief characterization of tspell
SPELLED.DNY     English dictionary 8476 words
SPELLED.EXE     Dictionary editor
SPELLED3.DNY    English dictionary 14795 words
SPELLER.EXE     Spelling checker (start here)
SPELMERG.EXE    Fast merging of dictionaries
TSPELL.INF      Document and a readme
TSPELL.NWS      News announcements about tspell
TSPROG.INF      List of programs from Timo Salmi
VAASA.INF       Info: Finland, Vaasa, U of Vaasa
WORDLIST.EXE    Counts frequencies of words
----            ------             ------  -----
0012

----------
Timo Salmi Spelling checking system release 2.5 (TSPELL25)
*          *****                            * *
includes the following programs and files:

SPELLER.EXE  (Ver. 2.5)  Spelling checker
=======================

   SPELLER is a spelling checker that can be applied on ordinary
text files.
   If you are using a wordprocessor, see its documentation for the
possibility of producing standard ascii format text. If you are
using an editor, there is probably no need for any adjustments of
the text.
   SPELLER needs a dictionary, such as SPELLED.DNY, which it loads
into memory. Thus, different dictionaries might be used for
different kinds of texts.
   SPELLED shows in reverse the words which it cannot find in the
dictionary loaded. You have the option of selective storing these
unknown words into a temporary file DICT.TMP. The option is invoked
by answering Y(es) to the question of pausing at unknown words.
   The accompanying program SPELLED (SPELLing EDitor) can be used
to enter new words into dictionaries. The new words can optionally
be entered from a file, such as DICT.TMP.
   To suppress the beeps at program warnings, and unknown words,
apply the call SPELLER Q(uiet)


SPELLED (Ver. 2.4)  Dictionary editor
==================

   SPELLED can be used to enter and delete words from the
dictionaries for the spelling checker SPELLER.
   The new words can optionally be entered from keyboard or file.
If a file is used, it must abide by certain conventions. 1) It must
have exactly one word per row. 2) The maximum word-length is 16.
3) The words must contain lowercase English alphabets only.
   If you are customizing an old dictionary acquired from
elsewhere, on top the the requirements above, it must be in strict
alphabetical order. There is an option in SPELLED for testing the
validity of a dictionary.
   SPELLED and SPELLER hold the dictionary in memory. The size of
the dictionary is limited to 22800 words. Although much larger
spelling checkers are commercially available, active 6000 - 20000
word dictionaries have turned out to be adequate in actual practice.
   The public domain version of the Spelled System limits the
maximum of SPELLER to 9000 words.
   Updating a dictionary with SPELLED takes awhile, since the
program has to preserve the alphabetical order at entering each
new word. See SPELMERG (at the end of this document) for a fast
alternative.


SPELLED.DNY                         TSPELL.INF

A dictionary.                       This document.


For more details of the Spelled Spelling Checking System, see the
documentation commencing on page 4.


WORDLIST (Ver 2.3)  Counts frequencies of words
==================

Usage:
WORDLIST [/h] [/ixxx] [/oyyy]
           │    │       └─ output file recall = yyy
           │    └─ input file recall = xxx
           └─ help

   While WORDLIST is not an actual component of the Spelled System,
it is an offspring of the techniques used in Spelled.
   WORDLIST list the words of a text file. The words can be listed
either in alphabetical order with their frequencies, or as a list in
the order of their appearance.
   Output can be directed to a file, or to the screen by giving CON
as the output file name.
   The program works by scanning each row of the text file until it
finds a letter, and then builds the word up until a character is
found which does not belong to the set of letters, digits, or the
set of ( -_#$%^ ), or until the end of line is encountered. Thus, no
word in the original text should not be divided on two lines, since
such a word would be considered two separate words. The following
characters are considered letters a..z, å, ä, ö, é, ü, â, à, ç, ê,
ë, è, ï, î, ì, ô, ò, û, ù, ÿ, á, í, ó, ú, ñ.
   If the frequencies of the words in alphabetical order are
requested, the maximum number of DIFFERENT words that the program
can handle is 8000.
   In counting the frequencies, any words longer than 25 characters
are truncated.


SPELLED Spelling Checking System by Timo Salmi
==============================================

   Before you do anything else, make backups of the dictionary
SPELLED.DNY.

   Spelled is a system for checking spelling, and building up
dictionaries. It contains the spelling checker SPELLER.EXE, a
dictionary editor SPELLED.EXE, this description TSPELL.DOC, and a
dictionary SPELLED.DNY specialized towards business research
terminology. At the date of preparing these instructions it
contained 8498 words.


Checking Spelling

   SPELLER.EXE is the spelling checker. It can be applied on
ordinary text files. Word-processor files might be checked with
SPELLER, but it is advisable first to convert them into ordinary
text files, and then apply SPELLER on the resultant file. See the
documentation of your word processor for more details.
   SPELLER first loads the vocabulary from the dictionary of your
choice. Then it asks for the file to be checked for spelling.
SPELLER highlights the words it cannot find in the dictionary in
reverse on the screen.
   Scrolling can be controlled by answering Y(es) to "PAUSE AT FULL
SCREEN".
   Checking spelling is case-independent. Thus, there is no
difference e.g. between England, england, or ENGLAND. Hyphenated
words are considered two separate words (e.g. well-known). Thus,
strange combinations-of-words can be passed undetected (this is a
general feature of spelling checkers). Another peculiarity of
SPELLER, as well as most spelling checkers, is that 's-genitives are
shown as errors (unless the letter s is included in the dictionary,
which is NOT advisable).
   SPELLER provides the possibility of choosing the dictionary.
Thus, different dictionaries might be used for different purposes.
The dictionary SPELLED.DNY accompanying SPELLER is specialized
toward business research. You can build it up yourself, acquire a
common dictionary from elsewhere, or even start from scratch.
   SPELLER has an option for building up a dictionary. If the option
"UPDATE DICTIONARY: PAUSE AT UNKNOWN WORDS" is chosen, you have the
choice of entering the highlighted word by pressing SHIFT + F4. The
chosen words are not entered into the original dictionary directly,
but into an auxiliary file DICT.TMP. This method protects the
original dictionary, and allows further cross-checking. DICT.TMP
will be on the default device.
   After exiting SPELLER you can use SPELLED to merge the new words
into your original dictionary. At that stage you still have the
possibility of changing your mind, and the possibility of selective
deleting of undesirable words.
   Needless to say that you should carefully keep appropriate
backups, if you are going to manipulate your original dictionary.
Note that the next time that you exercise the option of storing
words directly from SPELLER, the old DICT.TMP will be written over.
   The words in the dictionary can be up to 16 characters in length.
There is no limitation on the size of the text file to be checked
for spelling, although it is more convenient to keep the file size
within reasonable limits. FILEPAGE or FILECUT in TSFCOM.ARC can be
used for an automatic slicing of a text file into smaller
constituents.


Spelling Editor

   SPELLED.EXE is a spelling editor for entering new words and/or
deleting selected old words from dictionaries. The new words can
optionally be entered from keyboard or file. The words will be taken
from file if you answer N(o) to the question "ENTER FROM KEYBOARD".
The program then prompts you for the file name. If a file is used,
it should contain exactly one word per row.
   SPELLER automatically sees to it that the update file DICT.TMP
will conform to the right format.
   The name of a dictionary file should preferably have the
extension .dny.
   Entering new words and deleting old ones in the dictionary is a
slow process, especially if the words are in the beginning of the
alphabet. This results from the need of shifting the upper half to
the stack of words in order to make room for the new word in the
appropriate slot dictated by the alphabetical order of the
dictionary.
   The old version of the dictionary is automatically backed up
(with the extension .bck). Make ABSOLUTELY sure that there is enough
space available on your dictionary device. Else you might even lose
your dictionary!
   If you are customizing a dictionary acquired from elsewhere, the
format must strictly be the following. English alphabet in ascii, no
capital letters or special characters, exactly one word per line,
alphabetical order with no exceptions, no empty lines, and a
carriage return even at the end of the last line.
   The same rules apply if you use some other editor than SPELLED to
enter or remove words.
   You can use an option in SPELLED and SPELLER to confirm the
acceptability of a dictionary. If you use or edit a dictionary that
is not valid, the consequences are unpredictable.


General

   Remember that spelling checkers are just mechanical devices,
which look if they find a word in the dictionary. They do not in any
way check the logic of the text, and they certainly do not
substitute careful writing. Also be particularly careful when
entering exotic new words into dictionaries, since any spelling
misunderstandings will remain.
   A spelling checker draws your attention to words, which are not
in the dictionary. Since dictionaries (however large) do not contain
all the possible correct words, you have to decide yourself whether
a reversed word is misspelled or just missing. When you understand
this principle, you can get by even with a small, carefully edited
dictionaries. Small dictionaries have the advantage of being fast to
use, and easier to get and update.


TIPS AND HINTS
==============

   Each user will have his/her own preferred arrangements in using
wordprocessing and checking spelling. Find below some advanced tips
and hints grown out of experience in using the Spelled System:


Utilizing Ramdisk

   It is often convenient to transfer at least the dictionary to
ramdisk, especially during long sessions of wordprocessing. This has
the added bonus of protecting your original dictionary if you enter
new words. You must, however, remember to copy the changed
dictionary back from ramdisk before disconnecting your computer. As
a further advantage the dictionary loads faster from the ramdisk.
(On a 386 it does not make much difference, though.)
   You can even prepare a suitable (.bat) batch to perform the
copying operations.


Entering New Words into the Dictionary

   There obviously are several options for entering new words into a
dictionary. The following method is far from the most direct
available in using the Spelled System, but it is safe, and
relatively easy once one gets the hang of it.
   1) Use the option in SPELLER to enter new words to DICT.TMP
      with SHIFT + F4.
   2) Prepare an empty auxiliary dictionary AUXIL.DNY, or
      start with an AUXIL.DNY with just the word "a" in it
      (see below).
   3) Run SPELLED to enter the words from DICT.TMP to
      AUXIL.DNY.
   4) List the words in AUXIL.DNY on the screen and make sure
      that there are no misspelled words.
   5) If necessary, run SPELLED again to enter the corrected
      words, and to remove the misspelled versions.
   6) Finally, run SPELLED again to enter words from AUXIL.DNY
      to your main dictionary (e.g. SPELLED.DNY).
You can, or course, take a risk, and omit using AUXIL.DNY altogether
and enter the wordlist in DICT.TMP directly to SPELLED.DNY with
SPELLED. Naturally, if you know in advance that there are no
mistakes in your text, this is the quickest way of building up a
dictionary.
   Experience has shown that it is convenient to gather about a
hundred words into the AUXIL.DNY file before cross-checking it, and
merging it into the main dictionary.
   Since a non-existent dictionary cannot be edited, you have to
start with a file with preferably one word in it. If you build up a
dictionary from scratch, you can provide the seed "a" as the seed in
the file. The most simple method of creating such a file is entering
the following MS-DOS commands (each terminated by a return).

                copy com auxil.dny
                a
                Ctrl Z


Sinclair QL

   The full version of the Spelled system is also available for the
Sinclair QL from the Microdrive Exchange of The Sinclair QL World
magazine. (But who cares about that any more. I don't.)


Technical Curiosities

   The Spelled System was first programmed by the author in
Turbo-charged SuperBASIC for the ill-fated Sinclair QL. Later, it
was converted into VAX-Pascal for the author's own research needs.
The I/O operations of standard Pascal are, however, painstakingly
slow. (No wonder Pascal is so adamantly imposed in universities on
students whatever their field.)
   The current versions of SPELLED and SPELLER are Turbo Pascal 4.0
(now 5.0) offsprings of those programs. The "trick" in the programs
was getting around the 64K limit in loading the dictionary into
memory, and performing a fast binary search of each word in a
dictionary fragmented in 64K chunks. This was not as
straight-forward as might have been expected from the advance
publicity of Turbo Pascal 4.0 (which is an excellent programming
tool, even for the pre-historic 16-bit-like MS-DOS environment).


SPELMERG (Ver 1.6)  Fast merging of dictionaries
==================

   SPELling dictionary MERGer is a new addition to the TSPELL
system, first appearing in Release 1.5.
   SPELMERG can be used to merge new words into a dictionary, or to
merge existing dictionaries.
   The dictionaries MUST be in strict alphabetical order, and in
lower case, and so on. SPELMERG checks for the potential errors.
   You can use the option in SPELLED or SPELLER for testing the
validity of the material to be merged, in advance. If you are
merging DICT.TMP into your dictionary, you must apply SPELLED first
on it to guarantee the compatibility.
   SPELLED and SPELLER hold the dictionary in memory. The size of
their dictionaries is limited to 22800 words. There are no program
dependent limits for SPELMERG.


A SAMPLE RUN:
============

SPELLing checkER, Ver 1.6 PD, Copyright (c) by Professor Timo Salmi
Address: University of Vaasa, P.O. BOX 297, SF-65101 Vaasa, Finland    3-Sep-88
═══════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════
STACK AVAILABLE: 386400, REQUIRED: 153000
╔═══════════════════════════════════════════╗
║ Enter ? for information on any item below ║
╚═══════════════════════════════════════════╝
NAME OF DICTIONARY? ?
  SPELLER works as follows. It reads your text file word by word, and checks
for each word whether it is in the dictionary. If it is, the text is written
on the screen in a normal fashion, but if not, the missing word is written in
reverse color.
  Here you must give the name of the dictionary you want to apply. SPELLED.DNY
is the dictionary accompanying SPELLER. Enter SPELLED.DNY here, if you do not
have a special dictionary of your own, or the alternative dictionary for the
registered users.
  The format of user's own dictionary must abide by certain rules, like strict
alphabetical order, lower-case letters, and so on as explained in TSPELL.INF
The maximum number of words that will be loaded from a dictionary is 22800.
This public domain version is, however, limited to 9000 words.
NAME OF DICTIONARY? spelled.dny
CHECK DICTIONARY (N,y)? ?
Checks whether the dictionary is in the required format. You should always
answer Y to this option when applying a new or a changed dictionary for the
first time. If you fail to do this, and the dictionary is invalid, the results
are highly unpredictable.
CHECK DICTIONARY (N,y)? y
WAIT... LOADING AND CHECKING DICTIONARY spelled.dny
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
NO FATAL ERRORS IN DICTIONARY, LOADED 8498 WORDS
UPDATE DICTIONARY: PAUSE AT UNKNOWN WORDS (N,y)? ?
  If you answer Y to this question, the program pauses at each unknown word.
You can then enter this word into DICT.TMP file by pressing SHIFT F4, or
continue without entering the word by pressing the Spacebar or the Return key
(sometimes labelled the Enter key). The options available will be shown at the
bottom of the screen when the checking commences.
  Note that the dictionary will not be altered by this option. (You have to
apply SPELLED.EXE or SPELMERG.EXE for that.)
UPDATE DICTIONARY: PAUSE AT UNKNOWN WORDS (N,y)? y
IMMEDIATE TEMPORARY UPDATE OF NEW WORDS [slows it down!] (N,y)? ?
  If you answer Y to this question, the program will temporarily update the
dictionary immediately each time you enter a word into the DICT.TMP file by
pressing SHIFT F4.
  There also is a special option SHIFT F9 which will update the dictionary in
memory, but not write the new word into the DICT.TMP file.
  Note that answering Y to this option slows the program considerably, since
updating an alphabetically ordered dictionary requires a lot of processing.
  The effect of the update stays in memory until the program is terminated.
The original dictionary on the disk is not changed in any way by this option.
IMMEDIATE TEMPORARY UPDATE OF NEW WORDS [slows it down!] (N,y)? y
Not available in the public domain version
IMMEDIATE TEMPORARY UPDATE OF NEW WORDS [slows it down!] (N,y)? n
OPENED a:\dict.tmp FOR UPDATES
If removable, do not remove disk from drive A: until exit from speller
NAME OF TEXT-FILE? b:tsutil.inf
OMIT CHECKING WORDS SHORTER THAN [1-16] (default=1)? ?
  This option gives you the alternative of not checking words shorter than
your choice. If you want to check all words regardless of their length (the
default), just press Enter.
  For example, if you want to omit checking words of one and two characters,
enter 3 (and so on). You will soon notice that the most convenient value
depends on the type of text you are checking.
OMIT CHECKING WORDS SHORTER THAN [1-16] (default=1)? 4
OUT OF BOUNDS
In the public domain version the maximum is 2
OMIT CHECKING WORDS SHORTER THAN [1-16] (default=1)? 2
PAUSE AT FULL SCREEN (N,y)? ?
The item is self-explanatory.
PAUSE AT FULL SCREEN (N,y)? n

...  the program checks the spelling ...

CHECK ANOTHER TEXT FILE (n,y)? ?
The item is self-explanatory.
CHECK ANOTHER TEXT FILE (n,y)? n

 DATE: Sat-3-September-1988 10:18:58   ELAPSED: 00:09:13.13

A:\ >



The Famous Last Words

   This document has been checked with SPELLER. No speling mistooks can
posibly remain.