Excalibur is a Macintosh spelling checker for LaTeX documents. You can optionally turn off LaTeX parsing, so Excalibur is a good plain text spelling checker too.
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, BBEdit, or Eudora.
- You can teach it about new LaTeX commands and environments that you define.
- Optionally spell checks text in the typewriter (\tt) font.
- You can create your own dictionaries.
- Works with Textures and OzTeX documents. It should work on any TEXT file.
- You will need System 6.0.5 or higher to run Excalibur. It will run on any Macintosh from a Mac Plus on up. (Should I continue to support System 6? Send me mail if you're using System 6.)
- If you are running System 7 or greater, there is balloon help.
- Excalibur is free.
- British, Dutch, French, German, Italian and Spanish dictionaries are also available. You can get these from sol.eg.bucknell.edu in pub/mac/Excalibur-dictionaries.
- It runs in native mode on a PowerPC. This is a fat binary.
- If you're not a LaTeX user, you can get a copy of the manual in PostScript and Acrobat Reader (PDF) format from sol.eg.bucknell.edu in pub/mac. The PDF version doesn't display properly if you have the Computer Modern screen fonts installed on your system. (Remove them and restart and all will be well except for a small display problem in the upper left corner of each page). This should only be a problem for Textures users who probably don't need the PDF version anyway.
Version 2.2 changes:
- Got rid of some of Excalibur's alerts. The program operation is much smoother. Excalibur displays the current state of the program rather than announce it with alerts.
- Excalibur no longer beeps when it can't find a suggestion. Instead, it puts a message into the suggestion box. It's much less annoying now, and it's fast enough on the power Mac that you may want to leave the "Auto Suggest" option checked.
- Excalibur will now open aliases to dictionaries. For example, suppose there's a dictionary on a server that you would like to use every time you launch Excalibur. Put an alias to that dictionary in the Excalibur folder and it will open it when you launch the program.
- If a document is already open, you can replace it with another as long as a spell check operation is not in progress.
- Excalibur now has a Spanish dictionary. You can get it from sol.eg.bucknell.edu in pub/mac/Excalibur-dictionaries.
- There are many other changes. See the manual for a more complete list.
