What's New in Spell Catcher X 10.1.1

Below you will find a list of changes in Spell Catcher X 10.1.1.

• Updated Linguistics
  Spell Catcher X version 10.1.1 incorporates the latest version of Proximity Technology's linguistic software and databases.
• Updated U.S. English Spellings
  We have incorporated the latest U.S. English Main Spellings database into the U.S. English Language Plug-in. This new database has more words (114,003 vs. 111,840), and contains new words that have become accepted in every day use.
• New U.S. English Thesaurus
  The U.S. English Language Plug-in (which is always built into the Spell Catcher X application) now contains another very complete U.S. English-language Thesaurus, created by Franklin Electronic Publishers. This new Thesaurus is not based on the current Merriam-Webster one (which is still available, of course - there are now two you can use and choose from), and has quite different content. The content is more modern, and is slightly less formal with the wording of the results you get than the Merriam-Webster Thesaurus.
• New Language Plug-ins Available
  We are also making available for purchase separately the following Language Plug-ins:
  - Canadian English
  - Dutch
  - Portuguese
  - Brazilian Portuguese

  More information about these languages is available on our web site.

• Completion now provides similar words for all English variations (U.S., British and Canadian). This is a simple change, in that the U.S. English similar words are provided to British and Canadian English as well. Not perfect, but at least better than nothing.
• Selection-based operations (Check Selection, Modify Selection, Check Selected Word) now work more reliably in the few apps we've found that don't deal with the public clipboard in the "usual" Mac OS X way (behaving more like a Classic application). This includes Now Contact and Now Up-to-Date, Adobe InDesign CS, and a few others.
• Two consecutive hyphens, when used as an alternative for an em-dash with no surrounding white space (for instance "This is true--if you") will no longer always be considered an error. If the words surrounding the hyphens are all considered correct, and there are exactly two consecutive hyphens (this has never been an issue with a single hyphen), then the spelling is considered to be correct.
• Choosing Preferences... from the Input menu will no longer always create application-specific for the active application. If the application is already in the list in the Applications drawer, then it will be automatically selected. If it's not already in the list, Universal will be selected.
• Changing the language of Omitted Words and Shorthand Glossary reference documents now properly makes the reference available in the new language(s) without requiring you to Quit and then Open the Spell Catcher application.
• Shorthands added to Shorthand Glossary documents that have more than one language assigned are now properly available in every assigned language, not just the one considered as the primary language at the time.
• Now display an error alert instead of silently failing when using the Learn command in the Input menu or one of the New Shorthand for Selection commands when there is no used, editable document available to add to.
• Learned Words, Omitted Words, and Shorthand Glossary documents now remember the state of the Show Duplicates checkbox when saved.
• If you never manually change the font for a Shorthand Glossary document's expansion text view, or change it so that it is the same as the default in General preferences (and then save it), that document's expansion text will always use the default font from General prefs. Previously, once you saved a Shorthand Glossary document, the font for the expansion text was more or less "locked in", and it wasn't easy to get existing documents to use a new default font if you wanted to change it.
• Slight tweak to what's considered a word separator during Check Selection so that checking HTML works somewhat better. Ignoring text between tags is the next step, but at least now tags and equal signs are no longer considered part of a word, so far fewer spurious errors are flagged. This and the updated HTML Terms Learned Words reference results in a better experience when using Check Selection with HTML. It's possible to change these extra separator characters via the defaults command in the Terminal, or editing the com.rainmaker.SpellCatcher.plist file. The key representing these separators is named "SCExtraWordSeparatorChars", containing a string value with each non-whitespace character that should be considered a word separator.
• Various changes to the Help Book's text and formatting.
• The Strip White Space module now does the right thing with non-empty lines that contain only white space.
• Modify Selection modules no longer look for HTML in the pasteboard. This was a problem when using the modules with MS Word, as the HTML it writes to the pasteboard is invalid, and caused incorrect results.
• Reduce the minimum height of items in the list of references/files/documents displayed in the Find in References, Look Up (references drawer), Edit Macros and Modify Selection windows. This looks better when you change the default font for these lists to something smaller than 11 or 12 points or so.
• Various changes to the default Additional References that are embedded in the language plug-ins and installed into Application Support/Spell Catcher/Additional References. This includes an updated version of the HTML Terms reference. Spell Catcher will not normally write over any existing Additional References in case they were modified by the user. If you want the new default Additional References installed, you need to unlock the existing ones, Move them to the Trash, Empty the Trash, then launch the Spell Catcher application and hold down the option key as it is launching. Similarly, if you ever need Spell Catcher to re-create the empty "My..." reference documents, you can launch with the option key down and it will create new ones.
• Small change to the way the Spell Catcher application is built so that it is properly prebound and can be more easily re-prebound by the fix_prebinding daemon (on Panther, at least).
• The input method sports a new icon, one that's actually a checkmark!
• Other minor enhancements, compatibility improvements, and bug fixes.
• All the fixes and changes from the various pre-release input method components have been incorporated:
  • Spell Catcher X input method component (Build 2B6)
    • Fixed a problem introduced in the 2B5 build that broke the Learn button in the Suggest Spelling window when used with the current release version of the Spell Catcher application (10.1).
  • Spell Catcher X input method component (Build 2B5)
    • Removed a tweak for Mailsmith introduced in the 2B4 build that interfered with auto-completion of email addresses.
    • Fixed a memory leak in the input method's UI Server application (Spell Catcher UI Server.app).
  • Spell Catcher X input method component (Build 2B4)
    • Worked-around an OS X limitation (bug?) that made it impossible to type into the Suggest Spelling window's Use: text field if the current keyboard layout didn't have a Unicode character mapping resource ('uchr').
    • Shorthand expansions now work somewhat better in Camino, which never lets any control characters (delete, tab, return) through to input methods.
    • Slow down shorthand expansions in Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, which seem to have major problems handling keystrokes after an input method "sends" text to them via an UpdateActiveInputArea, if those keystrokes appear "too soon" after the UAIA call. Note that these "slowdown delays" are specified in milliseconds, so it may well be the case that larger delays are required on slower machines, while smaller delays may be fine for faster ones. Contact us if you encounter anything related to this modification in these two apps, or if you have trouble with shorthand expansions in other Adobe CS apps.
    • Work-around QuickBooks bug that disallows input methods from suppressing keystrokes.
  • Spell Catcher X input method component (Build 2B3)
    • Fixed a problem where the Check Selection item in the Input menu would be disabled in Cocoa applications running on OS X 10.3.x when the selected text contained control characters such as tab and return.
    • Try to better determine when there is an active document the user can type into or select text to be checked. There is no foolproof way to do this, it is all based on ad hoc techniques and determinations. Please send us feedback if you encounter a situation where a particular Input menu item is disabled when you think it shouldn't be.
    • More stringent checking for valid selections to display in the Check Word, Look Up and Find in References menu items on Panther within applications that support direct document access of text.
    • Fixed an issue with some applications (generally Carbon, Microsoft Excel is the most notable) where interactive features would stop working after a certain sequence of events would occur. More specifically, this would happen in applications that have windows or dialogs with text entry fields or areas that could handle text from input methods (TSM-aware), and others that were not TSM-aware. When a TSM-aware text field became active, Spell Catcher's input method would stop handling keystrokes in any non TSM-aware ones.
    • Fixed an incredibly obscure and fairly difficult to reproduce crash in iCal when a shorthand glossary expansion containing many tab and return characters was triggered in iCal's Info Window (whether attached or detached), followed by a click in an event in the month view. This wouldn't happen every time, and may also have been related to having full keyboard access turned on in System Preferences/Keyboard & Mouse.
    • Guard against a rare problem where a keyboard event might not contain the equivalent Unicodes for the character that is typed to prevent a crash caused by accessing a nil string.
    • Work-around QuarkXPress bug that disallows input methods from suppressing keystrokes.
  • Spell Catcher X input method component (Build 2B2)
    • Fixed an issue where Timbuktu Pro would unexpectedly quit if the Spell Catcher X 10.1 (release version) input method was active.
    • Fixed an issue with the Check Word, Look Up, and Find in References commands where the most-recently-typed word was not used as the word to Check, Look Up, or Find, unless you first pull down the Input menu. In other words, using the keyboard shortcut for any of these items would often use the wrong word - the one that was displayed the last time you used the mouse to open the Input menu.