Documentation for SPELL2.CO by Fred Edelkamp, edited by Robert Benson

  SPELL2.CO is a machine language spelling checker program written for the Model 100 running the Tandy portable disk drive #2 and utilizing FLOPPY2, the operating system that comes with the drive.  This program will check a file in under half the time it takes for SPLCHK.BA to check the same file, and there is no extra DOS to buy.  As an example, I checked this file when it was 3542 bytes long with 638 words.  SPELL2.CO checked it in under six minutes, while SPLCHK.BA took over 14 minutes to check the same file.  Both found 41 words that were not in the dictionary, eight of which were misspelled.

  The first thing the program does is prepare the file with a built in version of the machine language program DCPREP.  (DCPREP by David W. Willman, 75775,202 3/23/86 Copyright 1986).  This will strip the words, throws out duplicate words & sort the word list.  You might want to read DCPREP.DOC before you run SPELL2.CO.  When DCPREP is finished it will call the spelling checker part of SPELL2.CO, it will verify that FLOPPY is active and check that the dictionary disk is in the drive.  You will only get one chance to do it right, otherwise, the program will have to be started over again.

  The program will tell you which dictionary file it is currently checking.  Any words in the file that are not found in the dictionary will be left in the ram file and the file will be renamed to SUSPEC.DO for later review.  It is best not to have another file named SUSPEC.DO in RAM, if there is you will end up with two files with the same name.  When all the words have been checked the program will return to the computer's main menu with a beep.

DICTIONARY PREPARATION

  The disk dictionary files must be on one disk and must be set-up as follows:

 1.  The first 26 files on the disk must be dictionary files and they must be sequential and only in Bank #0.

 2.  The four letters of the first file must be "DICT".  It is best to name the files DICT-A.DO thru DICT-Z.DO with only words starting with that letter within the file.

 3.  The words within the files must be in alphabetical order, all letters must be lower-case, word must be on separate lines, with no blank lines and must not contain spaces but may contain a hyphen or appostrophe as long as they are not the first character of the word.

NOTES

  SPELL2 was written in basic and compiled with TCOMP.  It was written for Power-Dos but the DSKO$ command (CALL MACRAMC+24, SEC, ADR) doesn't work with the TDD2.  I can convert the program to work with the Tandy 200 if I knew the calls for inserting and deleting characters from RAM files.  On the Model 100, CALL 27489, CHR, ADR  will insert a character and CALL 27551, , ADR  will delete the number of characters in C&D registers.  TD2TIP.005 documents the CALL I used for the TDD#2.