Spellex SDK for ActiveX - Technical Support

Revision History

Contents:

• Version 5.15
  
• Version 5.14
  
• Version 5.13
  
• Version 5.12
  
• Version 5.11
  
• Version 5.10
  

Version 5.15

• Spellex ActiveX now includes VB.NET and C# example applications.

• The OCX control is now compatible with .NET applications. (Its use in server-based .NET applications is not recommended, however.)

• The Spellex ActiveX programmer's guide has been reformatted as HTML Help, making it possible to perform full-text searches of the document.

• Spellex ActiveX's background spelling-check feature now permits misspelled words to be marked using a variety of text effects: text color, bold, italics, or underline (where supported by the control being monitored).

• The display of the spelling context menu in Spellex ActiveX's background spelling-check feature is now under the control of the calling application, meaning it is now possible to prevent display of the spelling context menu, or to display it in response to an event other than a right-mouse click. This prevents conflicts with existing context menus.

• Spellex ActiveX's background spelling-check feature can now check existing text contained by a text control and mark any misspelled words found (if the text control supports marking). This is useful in cases where the contents of a file are loaded into a control.

• Spellex ActiveX's background spelling-check feature can now be used with text boxes and edit controls. Although these controls do not support marking of misspelled words, the background checking feature can still be used to detect misspelled words when they are typed.

• Spellex ActiveX now works directly with TX Text Control from The Imaging Source. You can interactively check the contents of TX Text Control using Spellex ActiveX's TextControlHWnd property. You can also check TX Text Control in the background using Spellex ActiveX's background spelling-check feature.

• Spellex ActiveX supports a new property, CharacterSet, which specifies which ISO-8859 character set is used when checking text. This new property makes it possible to check spelling in non-Western-European languages such as Russian and Hebrew (provided a dictionary for those languages is available).

• Spellex ActiveX supports a new property, BackupUserDictionaries, which determines whether a backup copy of a user dictionary file is made before the user dictionary is updated.

• Spellex ActiveX supports two new properties, ShowDictionariesButton and ShowOptionsButton. When these properties are set to False, the "Dictionaries" and "Options" buttons in the built-in spelling dialog box will be hidden and therefore inaccessible to the user.

• The "Custom dialog box" demos in the Spellex ActiveX examples now demonstrate how to implement an "Undo" feature in the spelling dialog box.

• A new dictionary, tech.tlx, is now included. This dictionary contains Internet and technical terms, such as "blog" and "cybercafe."

• The "Ignore All" button in the built-in spelling dialog box is now enabled only if the reported word is misspelled. This prevents confusion in situations where problems other than misspellings were reported.

• URLs, e-mail addresses, and numeric IP addresses are now also ignored when IgnoreDomainNames is set to True. Also, the criteria for determining if a string contains a domain name are now more restrictive.

• When IgnoreHTMLMarkups is set to True, suggestions and replacement words no longer contain embedded HTML character entities in place of non-ASCII characters. Previously, if a suggested word contained a non-ASCII character (as in døg) a character entity was inserted in its place (as in døg) (but only if IgnoreHTMLMarkups was enabled). Applications which require character entities in place of non-ASCII characters can perform the substitution.

• The CLSID (COM classid) for this version of Spellex ActiveX is {245338C3-BCA3-4A2C-A7B7-53345999A8E8}.

Bug fixes:

• The "Custom dialog box" demo in the MFC example program no longer displays the built-in spelling dialog box before the custom dialog box.

• A problem where the entered suggestion depth was not honored in the "Suggestions" demos in the Spellex ActiveX examples has been corrected.

• The NextWord method now correctly advances to the beginning of the next word.

• The "Check 3rd Party" demo in the MFC example now displays the spelling dialog box.

• When a main dictionary file cannot be opened, the MainDictionaryFiles property is now correctly set to the list of dictionary files which could be opened. Also, the ErrorCode property is set to a value indicating the error that prevented the dictionary file from being opened.

• The CatchMixedDigitsWords property no longer defaults to True.

• A problem where the wrong word would be used in a replacement made when a suggestion was double-clicked in the built-in spelling dialog box after the "Problem word" field had been edited has been corrected.

• When a word ended in a period, and the period was followed by a single quote (e.g., dog.'), the word would be checked with the period intact, resulting in a spurious spelling error. This problem has been corrected.

• Checking performance when SplitWords is enabled has been improved.

• The German ß character is now correctly treated as lower-case.

• Characters such as "@" and ":" are now treated as word separators when IgnoreDomainNames is enabled, unless they appear in a string that appears to be a URL or e-mail address. Hyphens and underscores are treated the same way as alphabetic characters in domain names.

• Ampersands in URLs are no longer treated as HTML character entities when IgnoreHTMLMarkups is enabled. Also, a newline character encountered in an HTML character entity is treated as the end of the character entity.

• Possessive initialisms (e.g., D.A.'s) are now parsed correctly.

Version 5.14

• Spellex ActiveX now includes Canadian English dictionaries in addition to British and American English. Separate American, British, and Canadian CAB files are also included.

• The CLSID (COM classid) for this version of Spellex ActiveX is 707873c7-03bb-4f1a-95ec-4aaf1c3d463e.

• The RTF source of the help file displayed when the "Help" button is clicked in one of Spellex ActiveX's built-in dialog boxes is now included. This file can be used as a starting point for creating a custom dialog help file. The file is located in \Program Files\Spellex ActiveX\lib\wspelldlg.rtf.

• A Frequently Asked Questions document, containing answers to common questions about using Spellex ActiveX, is now included. To display the document, select Start + Programs + Spellex ActiveX + Frequently Asked Questions.

• URLs and e-mail addresses are now ignored when the IgnoreDomainName property is set to True.

• HTML character entity references that stand for alphabetic characters (e.g., å) which appear in the middle of a word no longer cause the word to be split.

• The modification state of an unchanged rich-edit control monitored by the CheckBackground feature is now preserved.

• The CheckBackground feature no longer hangs if a doubled word is entered and the CatchDoubledWord property is True.

• The CheckBackground feature now detects misspelled words which begin or end with an apostrophe.

• A problem with the CheckBackground feature where a misspelled word corrected using the backspace key would not be completely unmarked has been corrected.

• The CheckBackground feature no longer incorrectly marks words followed by an ellipsis (...) as misspelled.

• A problem where the context menu displayed when right-clicking over a misspelled word marked by the CheckBackground feature would contain garbage characters has been corrected.

• A problem where notification messages sent by the rich-edit control being monitored by the CheckBackground feature were not forwarded to the control's parent has been corrected.

• The CheckBackground feature no longer displays a "wait" mouse cursor while checking the spelling of a word just typed.

• The load time required for text dictionaries (.tlx files) has been reduced.

• The checking performance when the SplitWords property is set to True has been improved.

• A problem where the German "ß" character was treated as upper case has been corrected.

• A problem where duplicate suggestions would sometimes be reported, both in the built-in dialog box and via the Suggestion property, has been corrected.

• When the StripPossessives property is False, suggestions offered by Spellex ActiveX will no longer be coerced into the possessive form even if the misspelled word was in the possessive form.

• A problem with replacements made to part of a hyphenated word has been corrected.

• Spellex ActiveX uses the window class name of a control whose window handle is passed to the TextControlHWnd property to determine how to communicate with the control to highlight text, replace words, etc. Sometimes text controls are subclassed from the standard controls, but use different window class names. In this situation, Spellex ActiveX may be unable to determine how to communicate with the control which may cause various problems such as highlighting being off by one character, etc. This can be corrected by creating a string value in the system registry under the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Spellex\WSpell key with the name of the text control's window class and a value of the underlying standard text control's window class name. For example, if the text control has a class name of "MyRichEditControl" and is based on the standard "RichEdit20A" control, create the following string value:

  MyRichEditControl = "RichEdit20A"

• Problems with the Spellex ActiveX MFC example have been corrected.

• A problem where the Suggest method would sometimes crash under Internet Explorer on Windows 2000 has been fixed.

• A problem which occurred when a TreeView control was placed on the same form a rich-edit control monitored by Spellex ActiveX's CheckBackground feature has been corrected.

• A problem where the ErrorCode property would not always reflect the status of the last operation has been corrected.

• A problem where the cursor position was incorrect after a short word was automatically replaced with a long word in the CheckBackground feature has been corrected.

Version 5.13

• The AllowAccentedCaps property was defined. This property is used with Spellex Software's French dictionary, and should be left as the default value in all other circumstances.

• The IgnoreHTMLMarkups property was defined. When this property is True, Spellex ActiveX will ignore text inside HTML markups such as <FONT> and &copy;.

• The CheckBackground method was defined. This method monitors typing in a rich-edit control for misspelled words, and automatically changes misspelled words to red in a manner similar to the "as you type" spell-checking features in word processors.

• New example programs highlighting various Spellex ActiveX features are now included. Examples in Visual Basic, MFC, Delphi, and Internet Explorer are provided.

• Spellex ActiveX no longer reports "Can't replace word; probably out of space" when replacing text in a rich-edit control containing more than 32K of text.

• When the IgnoreNonAlphaWords property is True, Spellex ActiveX no longer reports the same number appearing twice in a row as a doubled word.

• When a misspelled sub-word in a compound (e.g., hyphenated) word is ignored, Spellex ActiveX will no longer ignore the remaining misspelled sub-words.

• Sub-words in a compound (e.g., hyphenated) word that should be ignored because of property settings (e.g., IgnoreNonAlphaWords) are now correctly ignored.

• The TestWord method now checks the word in its entirety rather than treating spaces and underscores as word separators.

• The example wspell.inf file listed in the "Checking Web Pages" document now correctly lists wspelldlg.hlp, which contains on-line help information displayed when the user clicks a Help button in a built-in dialog box.

• Problems with "curly" apostrophes (character code 146) have been corrected.

• Problems with suggestions for misspelled plural possessives (e.g., workers', girls') have been corrected.

• The ReplaceAllWord method (and the Change All button in the built-in spelling dialog box) now makes all replacements with the same case pattern. In previous versions, if the replacement contained mixed case, the case pattern of the first replacement was sometimes different from the subsequent replacements.

• Spellex ActiveX no longer considers a period followed by a single quote (e.g., world.') as part of the word.

Version 5.12

• A problem was corrected where misspellings in the second and subsequent sub-words of a hyphenated or contracted term was not reported.

• A problem where the WordOffset property was not correct after calling the DeleteWord method has been corrected. The problem would appear as incorrect highlighting if a text control was being checked.

• A problem where the last word in a text control would be left highlighted if the text control contained no misspelled words has been corrected.

• A problem where user dictionary files might contain duplicate words if the same word was added two or more times has been corrected.

• A problem where the WordOffset property was not correct if the text being checked contained leading punctuation and the first word was misspelled has been corrected.

• A problem where actions and other words would not be saved in a user dictionary that had just been created has been fixed.

• The word-parsing algorithm was modified to accept trailing periods only in words that contain embedded periods and no more than two consecutive alpha-numerics. The algorithm will accept trailing periods in words like "U.S.A." and "Ph.D." but not in "spellex.com."

• The behavior of the SplitWords property was changed to accept only words formed from sub-words containing two or more letters.

Version 5.11

• Spellex ActiveX has been marked "safe for scripting" and "safe for initialization." This means Spellex ActiveX can now be used on Internet Web pages. When Spellex ActiveX is used in Internet Explorer, its behavior changes as follows:

  • Spellex ActiveX will open and use only one user dictionary file, named userdic.tlx. The AddUserDictionary and RemoveUserDictionary methods do nothing, The UserDictionaryFiles property cannot be set to anything other than "userdic.tlx".

  • The CreateUserDictionary method does nothing.

  • The AddToUserDictionary and DeleteFromUserDictionary methods ignore the file-name parameter, and always add or remove words to and from userdic.tlx. Also, AddToUserDictionary limits the size of the user dictionary to 32,768 words.

  When Spellex ActiveX is used in other containers, such as Visual Basic, the limitations listed above do not take place.

• All of Spellex ActiveX's properties and methods were carefully considered, and Spellex Software is confident that these precautions make Spellex ActiveX safe to use in Web pages, so it can be marked "safe for scripting" and "safe for initialing." Spellex ActiveX is marked "safe for scripting" and "safe for initializing" through the IObjectSafety interface, not through the registry.

• The phonetic suggestion algorithm was modified to work better with words which contain several misspellings.

• Suggestions for misspelled plural possessives (e.g., girls') are now handled correctly.

Version 5.10

• A problem where capital letters were not being reduced to lower case with wSpellAutoChangePreserveCaseAction or wSpellConditionalChangePreserveCaseAction has been corrected.

• A problem where attempts to add or remove a word from a user dictionary would fail has been corrected. The problem occurred when the directory pointed to by the TMP environment variable was on a different drive than the directory containing the user dictionary.

• The accuracy of typographical suggestions was improved, particularly for misspellings caused by inserted or deleted letters.

• A problem was corrected where the built-in Spelling dialog would add the other word associated with a word marked with a "conditional change" action to the suggestion list, but would not select the list item. This caused the Change button to be disabled, and forced the user to manually select the first list item.

• Some improvements were made to the American and British English main dictionaries.

• A problem which caused highlighting to be incorrect after a misspelled hyphenated word was detected when the SplitHyphenatedWords property was False has been corrected.