FYI: shareware Russian spell checker for Mac

[George Fowler]

Greetings!

While looking for something quite different, I happened to run across a
rather new shareware Russian spell checker for the Mac, so I downloaded it
and tested it last night. This is rather unusual; I've never seen one for
the Mac before, since it's so uncommon in Russia. The URL is:

<ftp://ftp.funet.fi/pub/culture/russian/comp/macintosh/Russian%2520Spell%252
0Check%25201.93.hqx>

(The confusing stuff at the end results from upper-ascii characters in the
file name; best just to go to the directory and get it by mouse or by
typing the first part of the name plus a wildcard character *.)

The good news is, it seems to work fairly well, and it is keyed to Apple
Standard Cyrillic fonts. Additionally, you can add words/forms to a
user-defined dictionary, although you cannot edit the base dictionary
supplied. The manual claims that this dictionary contains inflectional
forms for 60,000 words; I doubt that its coverage is morphologically
complete. The bad news is that it takes only *text* files up to 64K in
size, which is inconvenient. Moreover, it would be practically useless for
mixed-language files, unless someone has a really good way to strip out all
English words/characters more or less automatically, since it would
register all of them as misspellings. Still, I can imagine this being
useful for all-Russian documents.

George

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