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How do you spell relief? Spell Catcher for OS X

We all have our computing Holy Grails — things that we know would make our lives much easier and should be possible to do on our computer, but are not available at the present time because of annoying factors such as software monopolies, economics, or the overall lack of activism of the general computing population.

From this perspective, Spell Catcher is nothing short of a miracle. Except for a few minor imperfections, it is the Holy Grail for the many computer users who, like me, do one thing more than anything else on their machines: writing. Regardless of whether you are a fast typist or not, if you use your computer for writing, you just know that there are many things that the computer can do to help you spend less time on hitting keys on the keyboard and more time on the important stuff, i.e. organizing your thoughts and actually putting them into words. Things that the computer can do include: check your spelling, automatically correct your typos, automatically insert frequently-used phrases or sentences, look up definitions or synonyms, correct your punctuation, handle foreign languages, etc.

A Frustrating Model

While various computer programs have been trying to do all this for you for a long time, they have tended to generate more frustration than anything else. The reasons for this are obvious, yet persistently ignored by major software makers.

The most important reason is that we all type words in many different programs: word processor, spreadsheet, email software, web browser, database software, etc. Yet we need the same technological tools in all these applications. For example, I want my computer to know that “Igot” is a proper noun (my last name) and not to flag it as a misspelling or a typo. But I don’t want to have to teach my computer to ignore this word 1) in my word processor; 2) in my email program; 3) in my web browser; etc. I want to teach it once and for all!

The current model, still used by most mainstream applications, is to provide application-specific writing tools, whereas these services should really be available system-wide. Simply put, my computer should have one spell checker and one auto-text tool that work in all applications.

Well, today, it is possible again. Casady & Greene has just released the long-awaited OS X version of their flagship product Spell Catcher — and it does exactly that: provide a system-wide tool that handles both spell-checking and automatic-writing services (and much more!) in all applications through a unified and user-friendly architecture.

Spell Catcher OS X - Main Preferences window / Reference Files pane

While Mac OS X’s own built-in services, and especially its “Spelling” palette, are supposed to provide similar services, the simple reality is that, in most mainstream applications, such as Microsoft Office or Eudora, they do not work, because the applications have to be updated to support them — and most of them haven’t been updated, and won’t be for many more months or even years.

Available Now

Spell Catcher, on the other hand, provides you with such essential services now. In addition, rather than competing with Mac OS X’s built-in services, Spell Catcher actually complements them, by being fully integrated with the Services architecture. In other words, when Mac OS X’s Services do work — and, at this point in time, they work mostly in Cocoa applications, such as Mac OS X’s own Mail program, and also the recently released Safari — then, in addition to Spell Catcher’s own menu, Spell Catcher’s spelling features appear alongside Mac OS X’s built-in spelling dictionaries. Take a look at the following screenshot:

Mac OS X Spelling palette with Spell Catcher dictionaries

This is not a Spell Catcher palette window. It’s a built-in Mac OS X palette. But, in addition to Mac OS X’s own dictionaries, it also includes Spell Catcher’s.

In other words, in Cocoa applications, where OS X Services are automatically supported, you actually have four ways of accessing Spell Catcher: 1) you can use Spell Catcher’s own spell-checking commands through its separate menu, which is visible in all applications; 2) you can use Spell Catcher’s commands through the contextual menu that pops up when you click on Spell Catcher’s Dock icon; 3) you can use Spell Catcher’s commands through the “Services” menu that appears in the application menu; or 4) as can be seen in the screenshot above, you can use Mac OS X’s built-in spell-checking commands, but with Spell Catcher’s own dictionaries instead of the built-in ones. (There are also customizable keyboard shortcuts for Spell Catcher’s commands that work in all applications.)

If all this sounds confusing to you, don’t worry: in everyday work, this simply means that you have several ways of accessing the same functionality. You can simply use the one that suits you the best. In fact, Spell Catcher is so customizable that you can even create your own way of accessing its commands.

Switching Languages

For example, since I am a professional translator, I frequently have to switch between languages (English and French in my case). In Spell Catcher, I can assign a keyboard shortcut to each language, which works system-wide and enables me to let Spell Catcher know, with a single keystroke, in which language I am typing. (Spell Catcher also automatically updates its Dock icon to reflect the language selected, by displaying the appropriate flag icon.) This is the absolute best thing next to Spell Catcher actually reading my mind and guessing in which language I am typing without having to be told.

I can also instruct Spell Catcher to use a different default language depending on the application I am in. For example, right now, because of my work requirements, when I switch to Microsoft Word, Spell Catcher automatically switches to Canadian French by default. When I switch to Mail, it automatically switches to UK English (the closest thing we currently have to that elusive entity called “Canadian English”).

Two Modes

Spell Catcher also lets you choose between two modes: interactive checking, which signals errors as you type them, and the more traditional selection checking, which processes the selected text and displays errors in a separate window, where you can correct them or add words to your personal dictionaries. (You can also use a combination of both, of course.)

Like the vast majority of Spell Catcher’s features, these behaviors can be set differently for individual applications. For example, you can set Spell Catcher to check spelling as you type in Microsoft Word and Apple’s Mail, and not to check spelling as you type in other applications. (You first define a “Universal” behavior that applies to all applications, and then define specific settings for the applications in which you want to have a different behavior.)

The only limitation of Spell Catcher compared to some other spell-checking tools is that it cannot flag your errors visually in interactive mode. Instead of underlining errors with a dotted red line, it uses customizable sound signals. You can assign a specific sound to spelling errors, another one to punctuation errors, another one to capitalization errors, etc. You can also change the volume setting for each individual error signal. (Alternatively, you can get Spell Catcher to mute sounds and flash the entire screen instead.) Here again, you can define a universal set of sounds, and then change the settings for individual applications.

Spell Catcher’s spell-checking features include many more settings (ignore words that contain numbers, ignore roman numerals, ignore Internet addresses, etc.). It can also be set to either just signal errors or also automatically open a small floating palette with spelling suggestions.

As can be expected, Spell Catcher’s as-you-type features depend on the use of a separator: the most common one is the space character (between words), but Spell Catcher also works with the return character and with combination of other punctuation marks and the space, tab and return keys. As well, you can ask Spell Catcher to ignore individual words on the fly as you type them by simply hitting shift-space instead of space.

The only times when this separator-based approach doesn’t work quite right is when you go back over existing text and edit parts of words by typing or deleting a few letters only. Since Spell Catcher effectively “catches” your keystrokes as you go, it can only analyze and recognize full words as you type them. It cannot “guess” the whole word when you have only typed part of a word. But this is a very minor inconvenience (and you can always use Check Selection instead in such situations).

Custom Dictionaries

One important strength of Spell Catcher is also how it handles user-created custom dictionaries. If, say, you’ve ever struggled to get Microsoft Word’s custom dictionary feature to simply work reliably (let alone work efficiently and elegantly), then you’ll be mightily relieved to know that Spell Catcher’s handling of additional, user-created reference files is superb. You can easily create different dictionary files for different purposes (one for proper nouns, one for common abbreviations, one for alternate spellings, etc.), store them anywhere you please on your hard drive, and edit them to your heart’s content at any point in your work.

In addition, since Spell Catcher is fully multilingual, you can create user-defined dictionaries for specific languages or for groups of specific languages — or for all available languages. For example, language-independent proper nouns can go in a “universal” dictionary file that will be used in all languages, whereas language-specific spellings can go in a file that is only used for text typed in a particular language. If, like the less-than-typical, schizophrenic, bilingual French-born Canadian writer that I am, you constantly switch from UK English to US English and from French to Canadian French and vice versa, then you’ll be glad to know that Spell Catcher for OS X also lets you define dictionaries that apply to both French and Canadian French or to both flavors (or should that be flavours?) of English.

This added flexibility is new in the OS X version, and it’s always pleasant to see a computer program evolve in a way that further realizes the full potential of its underlying logic. It might not be the most glamorous feature, but in my case, it simplifies custom dictionary management significantly — and demonstrates an attention to detail that can only be dreamed off in more mainstream programs such as Microsoft Office.

Another improvement over the previous version of Spell Catcher is that the program now provides language-specific suggestions for “suffixes” for words that you are about to add to one of your dictionaries. If you are about to add a French verb to a French-language dictionary, then Spell Catcher X suggests the corresponding French verb conjugation (unless the verb is an irregular one, in which case the suggestions are not always correct), as well as other verb-derived forms, and you can check the ones you want to add to your dictionary at the same time. The same thing goes for nouns and adjectives. (In previous versions of Spell Catcher, the program only knew about English suffixes, and their combination with non-English words usually gave rather unsightly results.)

Beyond Spell-Checking

Where Spell Catcher really shines, however, is in the functionality that it provides beyond the already-excellent spell-checking features. This additional functionality effectively turns it into the Swiss Army knife of computer writing tools.

Spell Catcher can “smarten” quotation marks and apostrophes for you. And it does so in a language-specific way that more than matches the built-in behavior in Microsoft Word, thus finally enabling Word users to completely switch Word’s own automatic features off and rely exclusively on Spell Catcher instead.

Indeed, many languages have typographic conventions that differ significantly from the US English approach — and Spell Catcher for OS X is elegant enough to accommodate all of them. This extends beyond quotation marks and apostrophes: dashes (hyphens, en dashes and em dashes) and other punctuation marks (question mark, semi-colon, colon, exclamation mark, etc.) also behave the way that they should in each language.

Here again, of course, these automatic changes can — like all other Spell Catcher features — be turned on or off automatically or manually on an application-specific basis, depending on your specific needs.

In addition, since there are always situations where the program is technically unable to guess the exact punctuation format that is required (when editing already typed text, for example), Spell Catcher lets you easily cycle through all available options by hitting the same key repeatedly. For example, if you insert your cursor in some text and type a straight quotation mark and Spell Catcher curls it the wrong way (because it doesn’t know that you are at the end of a word), just hitting the straight quotation mark key again will change the orientation of the quotation mark. Hitting it once more will switch back to the straight quotation mark character itself, in case that’s what you want to use. And hitting it once again will go back to the first option. The same character cycling approach applies to hyphens/dashes, and to quotation marks in other languages. This means, in effect, that you will never have to remember again what the key combination to insert a quotation mark curled in a certain way is on your keyboard: Just hit the straight quotation mark key repeatedly until you get the one you want.

Spell Catcher also fixes DOubled CApitals, capitalizes proper nouns and acronyms for you, capitalizes the first word of a sentence, and prevents double spaces — all of this automatically or optionally depending on your needs.

A Shorthand Bonanza

The killer feature, however, as far as I am concerned, is Spell Catcher’s glossary functionality. Much of the typing that I do on a daily basis as part of my work is quite repetitive. For example, I work for the Department of Education of the Canadian province of Nova Scotia, so you can imagine that I have to write just that (Nova Scotia Department of Education) or part of it (Department of Education, or Nova Scotia) quite often.

Like Microsoft Word’s AutoText and AutoCorrect features, Spell Catcher lets you define abbreviations for such commonly used phrases. The difference is that Spell Catcher does it much more elegantly — and that it works in all your applications, and not just in Microsoft Office.

First of all, Spell Catcher doesn’t bother with the ambiguous distinction between “AutoText” and “AutoCorrect”. Both are effectively situations where you want your program to automatically replace a given string of characters with something else. Both are therefore handled by the same architecture in Spell Catcher, which is called “shorthand expansion”.

In the paragraph above, you might not have noticed it, but I never did type “Department of Education” or “Nova Scotia”. I just typed “ded” or “ns” followed by a space or punctuation mark and space, and Spell Catcher automatically replaced these abbreviations with the corresponding shorthand expansions that I have defined for “ded” and “ns” in my own glossary files.

Since “ded” is not a word or even an abbreviation in any flavor of English that I use, there is no problem. But “ns”, on the other hand, is also, in its capitalized form “NS”, the official abbreviation for Nova Scotia in English. So how does Spell Catcher know when to expand it and when not to? Well, in your glossary file you can specifically instruct Spell Catcher to expand the abbreviation only if what the user typed matches the abbreviation’s case exactly. In other words, I can specifically instruct Spell Catcher to only expand “ns” into “Nova Scotia”, and to always leave “NS” untouched. (And if you’re wondering how I managed to type “ns” in this paragraph — oops, I did it again — without having Spell Catcher automatically expand it into “Nova Scotia” for me, you should remember that simply hitting shift-space instead of space overrides the automatic expansion and temporarily deactivates Spell Catcher, leaving the string untouched.)

Even better: since all of this can be made either universal or language-specific, I can actually have the same shorthand abbreviation expand into something different depending on which language I am using. In my set-up, for example, when I type “cpb” in US English or UK English, Spell Catcher automatically expands it into “Cape Breton”. If I am typing in French or Canadian French, however, it will automatically expand the same “cpb” abbreviation into “Cap-Breton” instead, which is the French name of the same place. An easy way to avoid having too many different shorthand abbreviations to remember!

The same principle that can be used to create “corrections” for your most common typos or spelling errors. For example, because I am a fairly fast, but not professionally trained typist, I often type “fo” instead of “of” in English. Getting Spell Catcher to correct this error for me is a simple matter of creating a shorthand entry for it in my “SCX English Corrections” glossary file.

Of course, you first need to define all these entries. But I find that the time it takes to do so is easily worth the investment when I think of all the time saved from not having to type commonly used phrases or correct the same typos over and over again.

Since I am a bit of an organizational freak, I have put all my shorthand entries into several different glossary files that reside in different sub-folders inside my main “Spell Catcher Reference Files” folder, depending on their corresponding language. And I’ve put that folder in my Dock, with a custom icon, so that I can easily access any of the files at any point to add a new entry to it:

My Dock folder for custom Spell Catcher X reference files

I find that this is the most convenient approach for editing user-defined reference files in Spell Catcher. (I could also use DragThing to create a specific dock for reference files, each with its own dock button, and assign keyboard shortcuts to these buttons, effectively enabling me to switch to Spell Catcher and edit my reference files without having to lift my hands from the keyboard.)

Simply put, I couldn’t live without Spell Catcher’s shorthand features. While Spell Catcher for OS X was still in development, I had to make do with Microsoft Word’s built-in AutoCorrect and AutoText features — and it was definitely an exercise in frustration. Not only does Word automatically include (by default) many corrections that I simply did not want and had to delete manually one by one, but it also is not case-sensitive — i.e. you cannot prevent Word from expanding “NS” as well as “ns”. The only significant benefit of Word’s own features is that they let you include Word-specific character formatting in your AutoText/AutoCorrect entries, which Spell Catcher obviously cannot do, since it is not an application-specific tool. But I find that whatever needs I have in terms of character formatting in automatic text entries can easily be handled by a few AutoText entries in Word — and I can safely turn AutoCorrect off entirely.

And, of course, I should repeat, once again, that Microsoft’s automatic text features only work in Office programs. Even then, they don’t even work in Microsoft’s own Explorer.

All This… And More

As you’ve probably realized by now, I could probably wax lyrical on Spell Catcher for hours. The amazing thing is that this is not all that Spell Catcher can do. It also sports an expandable module-based “Modify Selection” tool that can do all kinds of additional things to text automatically for you: straighten or curl quotes (after the fact), change case, counts words, strip characters, change multiple spaces to tabs (or to single spaces) — and even “form paragraphs”, which is a compact way of saying that it can elegantly remove unwanted return characters in a chunk of email or web text that has gone through too many “hard wrapping” procedures and has completely lost its original paragraph composition.

And the truly amazing thing is that all this (and all the things I haven’t had a change to touch upon) can be yours for only $40US. If you are a registered owner of Spell Catcher 8 (which still works under Classic in OS X), the upgrade cost is only $19.95, but for a limited time (until March 31, 2003).

Simply put, if you are using your Apple computer running Mac OS X to do any significant amount of writing, in any application (Spell Catcher only has certain problems with a handful of absurdly bad and non-Mac-OS-compliant applications such as Microsoft PowerPoint X, which is probably one of the worst pieces of expensive software junk ever made for the Macintosh platform), then you owe it to yourself to make what is probably one of the most cost-effective investments a Mac OS X user can make!

- Pierre Igot

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