Spell checkers are standard issue on all word processing programs. Browsers started installing them too since people spend more time typing in forms inside browsers than typing notes in MS Word. Lately, spell checkers have found their way into a variety of applications such as programmer’s notepad and even a spell checking clipboard manager. But why limit yourself to a selected set of programs?
tinySpell is a small program that allows you to easily and quickly check the spelling of words in any application. The program runs in the background, watching what you type and whenever it detects a misspelled word, it alerts you with a pop-up and a flashing icon in the system tray. Clicking the icon, the pop-up or pressing a hotkey, opens a list of suggested replacement words from which you can select a correction. You can set tinySpell to insert the selected word into your document or copy it to the clipboard or both.
tinySpell comes with a 100,000+ word-strong American-English dictionary. Unfortunately, the free version of tinySpell doesn’t allow you to add additional dictionaries, a function offered only in the paid tinySpell+ version. You can, however, add or remove custom words into the dictionary the same way you do in Microsoft Word and in web browsers.
The program checks spelling on any program that accepts keyboard inputs, including programs that have their own spell checker, such as MS Office. In this case, you might want to disable tinySpell for certain programs, which you can easily do by adding the program to a blacklist. Programs that are added to the blacklist won’t be spell checked by tinySpell.
The opposite is also possible. You can keep tinySpell disabled by default and make it active only for certain Windows programs that lack a spell checker.
tinySpell is available both as an installable as well as a portable application. The portable one is identical to the standard version but keeps the settings and all other data in the tinySpell folder. This allows you to carry tinySpell on a portable storage device and use it on any Windows PC without installation.
Now read: Ginger, a Better Spelling and Grammar Checker for MS Office, Firefox, Chrome and IE
You can change the language tinySpell uses by downloading the dictionary you want to use from the website and renaming the .lex file to 171.lex and the .sup file to 100.sup and replacing the original US English Files with the renamed ones.
ReplyDelete