ITS Standards

[DC Kelley]

May 23 update

I now have a working spell checking system in the Mini-Edit tool, where the new Rich text edit boxes are. Also there is a common tool bar so you can add various formatting command right in the tool (rather then cut and paste from other tools such as Word). Given my own dyslexia, this works pretty good. The tool bar has bold, Italic, etc as well as an undo systems and a find function. I can add a bit more to this with time. You can still export to Word or other editors.

There is also a custom dictionary that I am working on, perhaps in time I can get it to recognize things like your personal acronyms and the names of various code keywords. The spelling occurs as a background task, and takes about 2/3 of a second on a long entry. Alternative words are presented as a right click drop down list.

The bad news is it is implemented by a 3rd party Active X control and everyone will also need to install that control in order to use the tool now. I will build up a transparent script installer to handle this for people who do not want to deal with registering things.

Right now this is in release 412, but I had o split the code base to do this (in case we revert and do not use this tool) and the tool in question is made by Chado Software

Using the tool is transparent, like recent releases of the tool if you add formatted text. that pat of you record is stored in the RTF (rich text format) format (by the way we could support HTML if that is needed). When a text box with this type of editing become active, then a tool bar pops up (we don't no have enough space on the edit window to keep all the tool bars active at once). Using the tool bar, or common key stroke functions like Cntl-Shit-B for bold you can add formatting. Again, don't go nuts as the rendering side still has to print this when you are done.

A screen shot is below, showing the toolbar in the Use-Description text area as well as some formatting and some errors. Click-on-it to see it full size and the details.

As of today, I am looking for a few volunteers to test the product before I release it further. Contact me off-line if you are a current Mini-Edit user and would want to try this out before others Dave