Spell/400 makes use of the IBM APIs and they perform an essential part of the software... but can't you just put the QTW APIs together yourself?
Yes, of course, and they will make a good start to finding spelling mistakes - but Spell/400 has quite a few advantages in finding and correcting mistakes and managing the whole system:
The cost of the IBM dictionaries alone is probably more than Spell/400 but unfortunately IBM don't supply them anymore so they can be quite hard to get hold of. If you haven't already got them from AS/400 days then it's unlikely you will be able to get them. Of course if you already have the IBM dictionaries then you can use them within Spell/400.
The QTW APIs make no provision for adding words, so words that don't exist in old dictionaries will always be flagged as mistakes no matter how many times the user says they are OK. With Spell/400 the word can be added to their own personal (or shared) dictionaries and never be flagged up again.
It's also easy to create your own dictionaries of 1000s or 100,000s of words from your own database of widgits or customer names etc. and the examples supplied show various ways of doing this in CL or RPG.
The popup windows are really quite advanced for the green screen - optionally using graphical enhancements, and webfacing. The user has a choice of 6 styles which they can rotate between at any time; either simulating a PC spellchecker or a traditional keyboard application or something inbetween or something entirely better!
The Spell/400 APIs make use of a word-processing 'engine' which can internally manipulate text like a PC word processor. It allows for a far more natural treatment of sentences (good or bad punctuation, paragraphs, onscreen positioning) than can be achieved with a simple string variable scan/replace.
No amount of punctuation (which includes common 'words' such as email addresses) cause problems:
And the fact that the 'engine' processes words rather than strings allows for some 'intelligent' handling of mistakes:
The QTW APIs can't help with text manipulation at all, so in programming this yourself you should be aware of the difficulties in 'real world' text. For instance, if you have a string which has a mispelled 'thy' it wouldn't be too hard to search for every occurrence of "thy" and replace it with the correction (e.g "they"). Unfortunately real-world examples show just how difficult that can be:
"Thy would't think it noteworthy, would thy!"
The Spell/400 screen APIs can manipulate text so that words can be replaced on-screen, like a PC spell checker. Spell/400 scrapes the words off the screen and highlights each word, and replaces them as they are changed, on-screen.
It can assume you are using paragraphs (like free-format notes) or lines of text (like one-line descriptions in a subfile). When it detects more than one paragraph, and word changes mean that the first paragraph changes its length, it has the sophistication to alter the number of spaces so the paragraphs are kept separate and distinct.
You can click, left-click, right-click, double-click, shift-&-click, click inside the window or click outside. There are push buttons to click, or just click on the words or suggestions. Practically every combination of mouse position and button produces something intuitive!
Or - even easier for some - position the cursor key and hit Enter or an FKey. For instance to accept a correction just put the cursor on the suggestion and press Enter - to accept all occurrences put the cursor to the left of the suggestion and press Enter. To move the window move the cursor outside of the window and press Enter. The Fkeys defined conform to the CUA standards of, for example, F9=Change (a word) and F6=Add (a word).
Spell/400 has a well-developed 'intelligent' interface. As well as the text-processing engine and variety of interface styles, mouse usage, cursor positioning etc it has many intuitive features which are unusual in the straight-jacket 5250 interface. An example is the 'quick' style where all mistakes and suggestions are provided in a single window. Not only are the usual mouse clicks and FKeys useful, but the user can just type in their own suggestions without careful positioning, and Spell/400 can work out what they mean by the context. This 'intelligence' is so pervasive that it's easier to 'discover' than it is to explain
Many words are so frequently mistyped that Spell/400 has a special dictionary of auto-corrections which can be added to just like any other dictionary. Spelling mistakes such as 'seperate' and 'desparate' are obvious candidates and we include about 500 common mistakes but it can be added for any employee or product names or any word particular to each individidual organisation.
If you're concerned enough about correct spelling that you want a spell checker then you should be concerned enough about whether your users are using or abusing it!
Each word added can be referred to an administrator to approve the word. There are multiple options to restrict who can add or ignore words, depending upon how strict your requirements are.
Every spelling mistake that is ignored or changed is tracked in the audit log complete with screenprints to 'replay' what was done, so if you find some users just ignoring or adding words you can actually see the screens that were shown at the time:
| Spell check | QTW | Spell/400 |
|---|---|---|
| Spell Check a String |  |
|
| Prompt suggestions | |
|
| Replace words in string | |
|
| Multiple scan/replace | |
|
Add words to dictionary |
|
|
| Replace words onscreen | |
|
| Manage dictionaries | |
|
| Supplied dictionaries | |
|
| Audit log | |
