FAQ

Question:
Why doesn't Penfriend spell-check all new words?

Affecting products:
All Penfriend products.

Problem:
When I make a spelling mistake Penfriend learns the word even though it is spelt wrongly.

Solution:
Spelling checkers suffer from exactly the same problems as Penfriend's lexicon. How does it know whether you really wanted to write the letters you did? Whether you correctly typed a rare word, or wrongly typed a common one?

Word processors, such as Microsoft Word and Open Office have excellent spell checkers. There is no point in duplicating these.

With predictors that do have spell checking, you have to switch off the spell checking before you can learn new words.

If you are a teacher working with someone who has very bad spelling, switch on 'learn new words' and switch off 'predict new words'. Then at the end of a session the wrongly spelt words will appear as new words. This tells the teacher what mistakes are being made. This is one of the strengths of Penfriend. If you want to you can 'ban' or 'never predict' particular words, so that they will be learnt but never predicted.

FAQ answered:
by RLS 2005-09-16