[OS X TeX] spellcheckers

[Matthias Damm]

At 13:16 Uhr -0400 22.07.2002, Philip Graber wrote:

> I am new to the Mac.  What should I know about choosing between
> Excalibur and cocoAspell for a spellchecker?

They use completely different concepts.
Excalibur is a standalone application which can open your .tex (or
whatever) document, correct it and save it again.
cocoAspell is a kind of "plugin" to the system which can be used by any
application supporting MacOS X's spellchecking functionality.

Both work fine, cocoAspell is much more convenient of course since you do
not have to open a second application, can use the "check while you type"
option etc.

Both are optimized for TeX, cocoAspell is much more configurable however.

As a conclusion I would say that Excalibur is a great app and was extremely
valuable under MacOS 9 and earlier, but since Apple has finally integrated
spellchecking into the OS with OS X today cocoAspell is probably the better
choice.

They are both quite small downloads, so you will easily be able to try them
both.

Best regards,
Matthias

P.S. A specific argument against CocoAspell is that it does not provide
German pre-reform spellchecking. I, like many people, do not use
post-spelling-reform rules, but the differences are not very big on the
word-level, so I simply add the words cocoAspell marks as incorrect
although they are correct according to "classic" rules manually.
-- 
Matthias Damm <m.damm at web.de>
PGP key available
"Ein Optimist, wer unsere Welt für die beste aller möglichen hält;
ein Pessimist, wer fürchtet, daß dies stimmt" - James Branch Cabell

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