by David Engstrom

General Impressions: Spell Catcher 8 from Casady & Greene is a universal spelling program that will help you correct spelling errors in any application that accepts text input. In addition it has a built-in thesaurus and dictionary. Although Spell Catcher won't insure that you have complete 100% error free text, it comes pretty darn close ( you'll still need to proof-read for errors of context - such as typing "form" when you meant to say "from").

The program has been revamped into an application (it used to be a control panel) and sports a whole slew of new features, including the ability to spell check and do thesaurus look-ups in 8 different languages (American & British English, Spanish, Canadian French, French, German, Italian, Swiss German). The program is very robust, feature rich, and customizable, almost to the point of confusion. Professional writers will be pleased with the cornucopia of features and those that just wants an accurate & efficient spell checker, can ignore the myriad of options, install the program, and go.

Installation: The program comes on a CD, so you have to have a CD drive. Other than that installation is straight forward. If you want the ability to spell check other languages than English, you will have to do a custom install which will include the relevant extra dictionaries. You also must be running OS 8.1 or later. You can import spelling dictionaries from certain other programs, including Microsoft Word, and WordPerfect.

Main Features

Spell Checker: The core of Spell Catcher is its spell checking ability, which the program executes with agility and aplomb. Its English dictionary comes with 80,000 words and you can add your own supplemental words to custom dictionaries. Spell checking can be either interactive - checking as you type - or "after the fact" - checking a document after you have done all the typing or checking a document someone else has written and you want to proofread.

SpellCatcher's pull-down Checkmark Menu showing Interactive Checking active

Interactive spell checking can be turned on or off in Spell Catcher's checkmark menu or in the programs preference dialog box. Once turned on it will alert you by making comments ("curious" for a misspelled word), making an alert sound or blinking the menu bar - depending on which option you have chosen in the preferences. It alerts you every time you misspell a word, make a capitalization mistake, use double words (the the - for example) or make punctuation mistakes, and then hit the space bar or insert punctuation to end a sentence. You can then summon Spell Catcher to supply you with a list of suggested correct spellings by either hitting a key stroke command or choosing "Suggest Spelling" from the Checkmark menu.

Choose the correct word from the selected list by either keystroke or by double-clicking, and the corrected word replaces the incorrect word in your document. If the word you typed is not an error but just a word that is not in one of Spell Catcher's dictionaries, you have the option of adding the word to a supplemental dictionary - from then on this word will not be flagged as an error.

The Suggest Spelling Window is called forth either by selecting it from the menu or by keystroke command. For those really bad spellers, there is an option to have the dialog box appear automatically whenever you misspell a word - use this option with caution, as it can become quite annoying in a very short period of time!

The check spelling "after the fact" option works much the way traditional spell checker programs operate. You must highlight the text you wish to check - from one word to the entire document. Choose "Check Selection" from the Checkmark menu and Spell Catcher goes through your selected text alerting you each time it finds an error and then suggesting possible correct spellings. Spell Checker does this correcting either by copying your text to the clipboard, correcting the text there and then pasting it back into the document, or by using the Search and Replace function of some programs to correct your spelling mistakes throughout the document. The different methods are required for different programs, in order to maintain formatting.

The check spelling functions are highly customizable, for example you can have the feature ignore words with numbers (useful when you have a lot of scientific formulas to type) or ignore e-mail addresses and URLs, among other options.

The preference dialog box allows you to customize SpellCatcher in a myriad of ways. For the typical user you can ignore a lot of these settings. Be sure however to turn on the Ghostwriter function, one day you'll be grateful you did.

Dictionary & Thesaurus: The thesaurus has been beefed up in this version of Spell Catcher and a dictionary function has been added. The thesaurus, when called upon will provide you with numerous synonyms (words meaning the same thing) and antonyms (words meaning the opposite), for the last word you typed, a word you highlight or a word you enter in the thesaurus dialog box. In addition to giving you the numerous meanings of the word, the thesaurus also tells you what the word means when used differently in the structure of a sentence - for example as a noun, verb or adjective.

The dictionary gives you simple definitions of the different meanings of the word. These two functions can be called upon either by keystroke command or by selecting the option in the checkmark menu. You can even tunnel down, double-clicking word after word, to get just the right one to fit the meaning you are trying to get across .... a great boon to wordsmiths.

The Look Up dialog box shows both the thesaurus and dictionary. It appears that my use of "aplomb was right on the money!

Shorthand Glossaries: This feature allows you to expand an abbreviation into an expanded phrase, for example "btw" could be expanded to "by the way". This can be done either interactively, on the fly as you type, or during "after the fact" checking. Another use for this function is to add words you frequently misspell or mis-type to the glossaries. For example if you constantly mis-type "from" as "frm" you can set up Spell Catcher to automatically retype the word correctly.

Spell Catcher comes with an extensive built-in abbreviation library of commonly misspelled words - you will often see it correcting your errors automatically as you type. It is easy to add your own abbreviations to a glossary using the "Edit Shorthand Glossaries" dialog box.

Ghostwriter: This is a real life saver. It has certainly saved my bacon numerous times. When active, Ghostwriter keeps a text file copy of all your text related keyboard inputs in the Spell Catcher folder found in the System folder. In the event of a crash you should be able to reconstruct that document you swore you were just about to save right before the crash occured! Ghostwriter however does not keep any of your document's formatting. Also Ghostwriter can only keep track of text in the order it was typed, so if you jump around in the text, adding a phrase here and there, or do a lot of backspacing, your Ghostwriter file for that document will look a bit like a jumble of text and square characters (backspaces are seen as small squares). However you will be able to get the gist of what you were trying to convey in the original document (even if you can't recover all the text exactly as it was), and that really is the important thing. You can set Ghostwriter to erase the files it is keeping of your work after a certain period of time.

Spell Catcher has built-in Modify Selection commands for massaging text. You can for example make all double spaces in a document, single space (in case you receive a document from a double space fanatic) and turn straight quotes into curly quotes (the publishing standard....except on the Internet) among a host of other modifications. You can string these modifications together into macros in order to apply multiple modifications all at once to selected text. Finally there is a Statistics function that will, among other things, tell you how many words/sentences you have in a document and give you a rough idea of the reading level of your prose. The program comes with a very well written printed manual that explains in detail all of SpellCatcher's functions and customization options. The program also has more concise built-in help.

Minor Quibbles: When you have Interactive Checking on the program will remember several past errors, if you haven't corrected them. The idea is that if you have this great turn of phrase you are trying to get out, you might not want to stop to correct your prose until you have that vital thought in print. This function however keeps the Suggest Spelling window in place instead of dismissing it automatically once you have corrected the current word you are working on. This is one option I wish they had built into the program - to be able to have it just remember the last misspelled word, if you prefer.

We also found that this version of SpellCatcher would not check your spelling in certain dialog boxes of some programs, that previous versions of SpellCatcher would (Dreamweaver is one example).

Conclusion: Spell Catcher is an excellent program that runs rings around the built-in spell checking programs that are a part of other applications. It is highly customizable verging on Featuritus (an option lets you ignore spelling mistakes in windows that have "password" in the title so that it won't beep when you type in your obscure password - I guess that would be one beep too many!). However a power user will be happy to have most of these features at their beck and call and for those that are just looking for an accurate & fast spell checking program, that will work in all applications and even let you spell check in numerous languages, Spell Catcher is a must buy.

Product: SpellCatcher 8

Suggested Retail Price: $50

Company: Casady & Greene, Inc.

Hits: Excellent fast, well thought-out spell checking fuction and robust thesaurus, useful additional features for the professional writer, good manual, inexpensive, free demo

Misses: None significant

Rating: (5 possible)

Requirements: - CD-ROM drive - OS 8.1. or newer or newer recommened - will run slower on pre PowerPC machines