Jim,

You take me back a dcade (or more), when I was checking out every shareware text editor I could find. I had a regular "name game" section in my local Lions Club Bulletin - spell check versions of members' names. There's a few which still spring to mind.

My old mate "Fatty" (Ron Dennis) became Round Dennims
"Rodent" (Barry Rhodes) was Barmy Roads
Innes Dunston became Inner Dustbin
Myself (Sam Sampson) was appropriately Same Simpleton

The classic, however, was our local Anglican Minister (female). Reverend Airdry Dyson-Leask became Revered Artery Doesn't Leak - I'd hope not!....;)

In a slightly more serious vein - I used to get off-colour - in those days, almost all spell-checks spoke US as opposed to UK "English" - so I sent very few cheques off to the program authors...;^)

In addition they all choked on Maori placenames and words, which I use regularly. In desperation, I finally twigged on the idea of using the "user dictionary" of my favourite text editor (NoteTab) as a word-list to throw through any new spell-check I'm checking out. Just hit "learn word" at each hiccup.

Finally, there's a very delicate balance in the number of words which one's spelling checker should accept. There's just so much delightful ambigiuity of spelling, meaning, pronunciation, etc in our cranky "English" language, that total confusion and hilarity can result if all "acceptable" versions of words are accepted by your spelling checker.

I often use a freeware OCR program(me) (Wocar), written by a French guy. It's great, but Cyril Cambien, the author, seems to have grabbed every "English" word-list he could find to feed into the dictionary. It accepts words with archa(e)ic spellings, those from many scientific (and other) disciplines etc. - then, translates what it "reads" from the page, and "accepts" some strange words - some I've never heard of.

Output of "basic English" text scanned in can end up highly esoteric. Careful proofreading is needed.

Ain't the "English" language grand - especially when combined with a spell-check. I'll check-in later, but don't expect me to pay at the cheque-out..;)

In the meantime, I'll keep proof-reading - at the moment 87.5% proof whisky...;)

Sam