Newton Developer Technical Information: Newton Programmer's Guide: 2.1 OS Addendum /

Chapter 5 - Spell Checker / Using the Spell Checker

Use of Dictionaries by the Spell Checker

The spell checker assembles a list of dictionaries to use for both checking and correction. A word is considered to be valid if it is in one of the built-in dictionaries (with appropriate locale-specific words), the user's personal word list, or the list of skipped words.

The dictionaries used are the same as the dictionaries that are used by the cursive recognizer in a view with the vAnythingAllowed view flag set. For checking, the spell checker scans through the list of dictionaries looking for dictionaries that have any of the following flags set: vCharsAllowed, vDateField, vTimeField, vPhoneField, vNumbersAllowed. This means that dates, times, phone numbers, and numbers are "spell-checked" against the built-in lexical dictionaries.

For correction, the spell-checker uses the dictionaries that have the vCharsAllowed flag set, which includes third party dictionaries that have been installed as default dictionaries. The lexical dictionaries are not used for correction because they generate too many correct alternatives.