MapSpeller™ Danger Dictionaries











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MapSpeller™ Danger Dictionaries:
How to Avoid Unwanted Words

What Are Danger dictionaries?

Danger dictionaries enable the MapSpeller spell-checker to warn users when correctly spelled words that do not typically appear on maps are present. Those words are often embarrassing substitutions for other words. Such substitutions include sight for site, and worm for warm.

MapSpeller Danger Dictionaries Provided

MapSpeller uses danger dictionaries to keep track of potentially unwanted words. There is one danger dictionary associated with each language or language variant, and one for the "None" language option. Example of such file names include Danger_English (USA).dic and Danger_None.dic.

When a user account is created, or the first time a language is used, the MapSpeller master danger dictionaries are copied from the MapSpeller Program Data directory into that user's Windows profile. The user version is the version that MapSpeller uses when spell checking.

The use of danger dictionaries is controlled from the MapSpeller Dictionaries tab in the Options dialog. The danger dictionaries provided with MapSpeller are very small. The Danger_None.dic is actually empty.

Location of Danger Dictionary Files

Default location of the system's danger dictionaries:

Windows XP
- C:\Program Files\Edgetech America\MapSpeller, or
- C:\Documents and Settings\All users\Application Data\Edgetech America\MapSpeller.
Windows Vista or Windows 7: C:\ProgramData\Edgetech America\MapSpeller

Default location of danger dictionaries for the user with a "XYZ" Windows login name:

Windows XP: C:\Documents and Settings\XYZ\Application Data\Edgetech America\MapSpeller
Windows Vista or Windows 7: C:\Users\XYZ\AppData\Roaming\Edgetech America\MapSpeller.

To see these folders in Windows Explorer, the latter should be set to show hidden files.

Populating Danger Dictionaries

The MapSpeller interface doesn't provide a way of populating danger dictionaries. However, doing so is easy with the Windows Notepad program (Do NOT use any other word processor or program). MapSpeller danger dictionaries are plain ASCII files.

As illustrated above, the first line may contain the dictionary language identifier (#LID 24941 for US English, for example). It is optional and shouldn't be changed. To add a new danger word, add the word on an empty line, follow it by a tab, then the letter c. This action code letter should be directly followed by the suggested word to be offered in the Potential Typo dialog.

For optimum processing speed, those danger words should be listed in alphabetical order with uppercase letters taking precedence over lowercase ones. Dictionaries are case-sensitive.

To Stop Flagging a Danger Word

If you no longer want to be asked for the default substitution each time MapSpeller encounters the danger word, delete its line from the danger dictionary with Notepad.

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