Alventis supports both Spellcheck and Thesaurus. It is shipped with spelling dictionaries in American English and French, and the Roget's Thesaurus of American English. The UK English version of the Thesaurus and dictionaries in numerous other languages are available for download from the manufacturer of the component that Alventis uses for all its linguistic needs: Addictive Software (www.addictivesoftware.com/dicts-extern.htm).

The operation of both Spellcheck and Thesaurus is very similar to what can be found in most common word processors, so impatient minds can skip this chapter and learn how things work by just playing with the dialogs. We'll try to provide a brief explanation anyway.

Alventis Memos support the following Spellcheck-related features:

Support for all this is afforded by 3 types of dictionaries:

Main Dictionaries. These are the dictionaries of some language or perhaps a thematic subset thereof (e.g., chemical terms). The English and French dictionaries fall into this category. Each dictionary comes in a separate file with an ADM extension. Each of these dictionaries can be enabled or disabled individually by checking/clearing the checkbox next to it in the Spelling Options dialog which is accessible from the Spelling dialog.

AutoCorrect Dictionary. There is one such dictionary shipped with Alventis. It comes in a file named AutoCorrect.adu and contains a vast array of common auto-correct pairs for the English language. More on this later.

User Dictionaries. These are the dictionaries where your amendments of the Main Dictionaries are saved. When you tell Alventis to "learn" the spelling of, say, your last name – this is where it ends up. Alventis defaults to using a single such dictionary saved in the file called UserDict.adu. Alventis will also try to use your existing user dictionaries from Microsoft Word if it finds any. They would be typically called Custom.dic. You can enable or disable the use of specific User and AutoCorrect Dictionaries. You'd do so from the Dictionaries dialog: Spelling / Spelling Options / Dictionaries. It is from here that you can view and even edit the AutoCorrect and User Dictionaries. Editing of Microsoft Word custom/user dictionaries is entirely up to you. They are basically plain-text files with one word per line, but since they are not part of Alventis, we can't take any responsibility for what you do with them, so we won't even mention them again.

You can view or edit AutoCorrect.adu and UserDict.adu as much as you like though. They both have the same exact structure comprised of 3 sections:

Added Words. These are words that weren't found in any of the Main dictionaries, were therefore flagged as misspelled, to which you at some point responded "Add" in the Spelling dialog. This action adds words to this section of UserDict.adu. Which is why this section is likely to be empty for AutoCorrect.adu. This section can be thought of as an extension of the Main dictionaries.

Auto-Correct Pairs. This section contains pairs of words: the misspelled and the properly spelled version. For example, teh / the or adn / and. This section will be quite lengthy in AutoCorrect.adu since that's precisely its raison d'être. You can add your own favorite pairs there, or better yet, in UserDict.adu which is likely to have no pairs there yet, so it'll be easier for you to manage your AutoCorrect setup. Pairs are automatically added there whenever you click the Auto-Correct button in the Spelling dialog. This feature is of course not limited to correcting common misspellings. You can, for instance, tell it to replace occurrences of xxa by your signature or address or any other text you have to type frequently. As soon as you type xxa and hit either Space or Enter, it will be replaced by the text of your choice.

Excluded Words. This lists words you want always considered misspelled. Foul words, perhaps. Maybe you can come up with a more creative use for this.

The words you choose to simply Ignore or Change in the Spelling dialog are not remembered since both of the above operations are "one shot deals". Words you elect to Ignore All or Change All must be remembered somewhere to not prompt you again if they are encountered later. They are temporarily stored (just until you close Alventis) in a pseudo-dictionary called "(Ignore All / Change All)" which appears in the list of other User dictionaries whenever there's something in it. You can edit it in much the same way you'd edit the other "real" ones.

LiveSpell. We already told you what it is at the very beginning of this chapter, and there's really very little else to say. Whenever the Spellchecker considers a word misspelled, it will "flag" it with a wiggly red underlining – just as it is done in quite a few modern word processors.

You can right-click the misspelling and "make things right" using the context menu that appears. At the top it will list the spelling suggestions, if any. Picking one will correct the misspelling. Beneath these you will find two buttons: Ignore All and Add to Dictionary. These are equivalent to Ignore All and Add buttons in the Spelling dialog. Note that as is commonly the case, you can invoke the context menu by placing the cursor on (or just to the right of) the misspelled word and hitting the Application key on your keyboard. That's the one usually sitting right next to the right Ctrl key.

If you ever want to turn LiveSpell off, doing so is very easy: just toggle it by clicking the LiveSpell Toggle button. This setting is global, i.e., it will affect all Memos within Alventis.

Thesaurus. Select a word or simply place the cursor on it and invoke the Thesaurus to get a list of synonyms for that word. The interface is very simple and should be familiar to you from other word processors, so we will forego further detail.

Spellcheck Form. Saved for last is a little surprise. In Alventis, both Spellcheck and Thesaurus work in not just Memos, but other controls as well: Text Boxes, for example. And since you may have significantly more than one Text Box on an InfoView form, you can Spellcheck them all one after another with a single command: Spellcheck Form.