illcompost

The Woes and Wonders of Spell Checker

In Apple, Tech on 13 July 2008 with 8 comments

Although I can hardly write a sentence of decent Swedish without help I wanted to set up my old PowerBook G4, running Tiger, to do spell checking in Icelandic, English and Swedish. I’ve been using Stafsetning 2004 since it was in closed beta back in 2004 and was mostly satisfied with it.

My biggest problem with it started when I switched from an iBook G4, running Panther, to my current computer and OS back in 2005. One of Stafsetning’s biggest features, switching between Icelandic and the OS X Spell Checker’s language on the fly by a keyboard shortcut (or menu from Menu Bar if that’s how you roll), never functioned well after my switch to PowerBook and Tiger. A switch between languages would often mean I’d get an error message saying the Spell Checker couldn’t be contacted. Hardly a niggle but Stafsetning had its redeeming features and I’d have stuck with it if not for wanting to have Swedish spell checking as well.

I might have checked if my system already included a Swedish dictionary but instead decided straight off to try cocoAspell which is free and has a big selection of dictionaries. Removing Stafsetning from the list of Login Items didn’t remove its imprints from applications’ spelling menus but I (stupidly) installed cocoAspell anyway. Spell checking was, of course, borked. Uninstalling Stafsetning seemed the thing to do but the software makes no provisions for it nor could I find any instructions for doing so on Stafsetning’s website. I sent a mail to their support address¹ but as it was Saturday I expected no answer until next Monday at first.

Being an impatient man I ended up searching for components of Stafsetning, which by the way is an input manager, with Spotlight and then removed them by hand. Spell Checking was still borked. I uninstalled cocoAspell and that changed nothing. I found a new level to being frustrated and started pressing buttons. ⌘-⇧-. did the trick by bringing up this window:

No surprise I didn’t think of this as I never use it. Here I could switch from Stafsetning’s dictionary to one of a few included with the OS X’s native spell checking system. One of which is Swedish. You would think some text on some spell checking software would mention this little thing, though? I suggest something along the lines of “oh, and when you’ve finished removing our software by hand you might want to call up the Spelling menu for each app and change it from the dictionary you just removed.”

I also hope Apple has made changes to this system in Leopard and I should check to see if they have. Now that I have Icelandic through cocoAspell, along with the Swedish and English dictionaries included with Tiger, I want to find a way to change Spell Checker’s language with a keyboard shortcut. I’ve come as far as looking at Red Sweater Software’s FastScripts Lite but that option would mean I’d have to learn some AppleScript. There should be an easier way to do this.

Update:

Only fair to add that the developer of Stafsetning 2004 got back to me earlier today; Tuesday the 15th. Of course the matter was mostly fixed on my end, as I mentioned in the follow up to this post, but his response was very helpful.

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