CFOG's PIP, July 1986, Volume 4 No. 9, Whole No. 45, page 3

V-Spell: a new spelling checker

by Benjamin H. Cohen

V-Spell is a new spelling checker for both CP/M and MS-DOS computers. Selling for $79.95, it undercuts much of the market. I reviewed the CP/M version running on an Osborne 1. For purposes of comparison tests I ran everything on floppy disks.

One of the first things noticeable about V-Spell is the size of its dictionary and program. With 5 chaining overlays V-Spell itself runs 62K bytes. The dictionary is 153K bytes. On my double density Osborne 1 I had to put the program files on Drive A and the dictionary on Drive B. That meant that to check the spelling on a file I had to copy it to the V-Spell program disk, run the spelling checker, and then copy the file back to another disk. You'll obviously want double-sided, quad density, a big RAM disk, or a hard disk to run this one.

The size of V-Spell creates a few problems for those with reduced TPAs. <TPA, or Transient Program Area, is the amount of random access memory that is left to run programs in after the system overhead and any other RAM resident programs are loaded. A nominal 64K CP/M system usually has between 56K and 60K TPA.> When I run my Drive C: RAM disk and SmartKey with a moderate size definition file, V-Spell will check files but won't revise them. Switching to XtraKey, as I often do, makes enough room. SmartKey and the definition file alone are okay. If you're running a RAM disk, hard disk, print spooler, key redefinition program, etc., you may find that something has to be dumped to run V-Spell.

For comparisons, here are the sizes of some other popular spelling checkers that I have in hand:

Program Name	.Com Files	Dictionary Files
Spell	16	30
The Word Plus	47	103
Spell-M	6	56

<Spell is the $49.95 spelling checker from Software Toolworks, Spell-M is the public domain program. The Word Plus is a leading spelling checker.> Those with single-sided double density drives can put Spell or Spell-M on the disk with WordStar or possibly even NewWord; The Word Plus demands its own disk; V-Spell demands two disks forcing you to put the file to be checked on the program disk.

I ran a few tests on a file about 1430 words long. First I loaded the program by giving the command and entering the file name when asked. I timed the program's time to check the spelling in the file. Spell took 34.6 seconds; The Word Plus took 48.4 seconds; V-Spell took 72.8 seconds.

The public domain Spell-M took 60.5 seconds, but that's not directly comparable because it works differently -- it requires the filename on the command line and automatically marks each nonmatched word, writing the text to a new file and making the old file a backup file. Each of the other programs goes through a review process before writing a new file. The lesson seems to be that the bigger the dictionary, the longer it takes to check the file. If that leads to fewer 'false hits' <reports of mismatches that are actually correctly spelled words> that's good.

Then I compared the number of 'hits', or words found by the program that weren't in the dictionary. Spell found 13, V-Spell found 20, The Word Plus found 29, Spell-M found 30. There wasn't a single misspelled word in the file, so this was a test of the dictionary's completeness.

Actually, that's only partly true. The Word Plus and V-Spell work on the principal that a word is a mismatch if the exact word does not appear in the dictionary. Spell uses a 'hashing' technicque with rules about how prefixes and suffixes are added to roots. Thus if 'bunch' appears in the dictionary but 'bunches' doesn't, The Word Plus and V-Spell will generate a mismatch, but Spell won't. The authors of Spell figure that you'll get 2.2 missed errors per 1000 errors because of the hashing technique. On the other hand, you'll save huge amounts of time because the system allows use of a much smaller dictionary which greatly speeds up the time required to complete a spelling check. As we move away from floppy disk systems toward hard disks and ultimately power-protected RAM disks, this becomes less true.

The list of mis-matches explains just what the Spell authors are talking about. There was a common list of words that all three programs caught, mostly proper nouns or acronyms, including such terms as MailMerge, Triton <College>, and SuperCalc. V-Spell came up with some more words, bunches, copyrighted, transacted, unerase, and WordStar. The Word Plus came up with all of these plus a whole bunch more: copiers, debugging, discourages, diskettes, disks, Osborne, peripherals, pirating, renewals, stalwarts. The extra time spent with V-Spell to go through it's larger dictionary did generate fewer 'false hits', but still more than Spell's hashing technique.

V-Spell and The Word Plus both allow you to correct your text without returning to your word processing program. The Word Plus proceeds directly from the checking to the mark and fix procedure. V-Spell returns you to a menu from which you must hit two keys to move to the correcting function. V-Spell always saves the context of the mis-match and shows you from 5 to 20 lines of text <you select with the Settings command from the main menu>, and marks the mis-matched word. The marking is in broken brackets <>, but you can change that to reverse video if your terminal can do that and you tell V-Spell how to do it.

A selection of terminals is listed in the manual, but not the Osborne 1 or Executive. If you know enough to enter the codes to turn highlighting on and off, you can enter them. Even if you're not so technically minded, you can make the mis-matched word stand out by entering a string of characters to surround the word in such a way that it makes the target word readily noticeable on the screen. Choose the settings option to select reverse video, and simply enter from the screen the characters you want on the left side of the mis-matched word in response to the first prompt and the characters you want on the right hand side of the word in response to the second prompt. I found that putting the word between "arrows" like this ----->test<----- is very effective for this purpose. V-Spell uses the same markers or reverse video to highlight the current menu option, as well.

When you've chosen V-Spell's revise option, you'll be shown the first mismatched word in the file, in context, and asked what you want to do with it. You're told how many times this mismatched word appears in the file, too. Depending on your settings, you can choose to make the same correction globally or not, or have V-Spell automatically select global correction. If you do choose the global correction option, V-Spell doesn't bother you with the word again. I haven't thought of a situation in which I wouldn't want the correction to be global, but if there is one, this is an option that The Word Plus doesn't offer.

One of my pet peeves with The Word Plus is that it forces you to tell it you want to "discard" a word that is correctly spelled but not found in the dictionary. V-Spell uses the more appropriate term "ignore".

You choose your option either by moving among the menu prompts by hitting the space bar or by entering the first letter of the prompt you want to execute. In either case, you then hit the <cr>. You can correct the word or ignore it, add it to the dictionary <especially useful for names and technical terms that will be encountered frequently>, mark it for later correction with your word processor, or look up the correct spelling in the dictionary. The last is a boon to slow or error prone typists and bad spellers, since once V-Spell displays its numbered list of possible correct spellings you can simply enter the number of the correct spelling, hit the <cr>, and it's done.

V-Spell allows you to decide whether you want a plethora of prompts in the revise section. You may decide not to disable these prompts if you find that you make a lot of mistakes in correcting the mismatches. V-Spell, unlike The Word Plus, doesn't allow you to go backwards and then resume, nor even, like Spell, to simply start again from the beginning. You can hit ^C to abort, but that means reloading the progam, file, etc.

For the most part, V-Spell seems to be an improvement on The Word Plus, with a bigger dictionary and fewer false hits and more choices in the settings section. Whether you like this style of spelling checker, rather than the lean fast Spell, which simply presents a list of mismatches for you to ignore, add to the dictionary, add the root to the dictionary, or mark in the text to later correct with your word processor, depends in part on whether you're a good speller and a fast and accurate typist. If you are, you might want to save the time to run and the time to tell the program to ignore the false hits that makes Spell a big hit with some people.

If, on the other hand, you are a lousy speller and/or a lousy typist, you might welcome the opportunity to look up words in V-Spell's dictionary to get the correct spelling of a word, or the ease of correcting that comes in V-Spell. Except for the inability to move backwards in the list of mismatches, it seems a much better program than The Word Plus.

V-Spell comes from CompuView Products, Inc., 1955 Pauline Boulevard, Suite 200, Ann Arbor, MI 48103, (313) 996-1299. VISA and Mastercard accepted. Shipping extra.

V-Spell comes complete with obnoxious license terms, including a restriction on transfer. That means that if you agree to the license you cannot transfer V-Spell to the purchaser of your computer when you sell it. On the other hand, the packaging doesn't comply with the Illinois Software Licensing Enforcement Act <the so-called "Shrink Wrap Bill"> so it's doubtful whether the license restrictions can be enforced.