SpellTools gives you a suite of text tools available to virtually all your applications. Tools like Prooflistening, rubber stamps, and text cleanup tools in addition to a powerful spellchecker engine. And it's free.

However, there's a catch, for me at least. I have twice downloaded SpellTools from Newer Technology's Website; ditto the OS 9 updater patch from Craig Marciniak's Website (I don't pretend to understand the dynamics of the ownership of Spelltools -- Newer says its freeware, Marciniak says it's $10 shareware with the fee deferred). In neither case have I been able to get the program to work. It launches fine, but the toolbar that controls its functions refuses to appear on the desktop.

I've followed the installation instructions carefully, assigned plug-ins, etc., but nada. I also tried starting up my PowerBook (G3 233/192 MB RAM/OS 9.0) with just OS 9 (no 3rd party extensions) but still no joy.

An email to Newer's Tech Support elicited this response from Senior Technician Garrett Nafzinger:

"The current version of SpellTools has been discontinued by Newer Technology and is not compatible with Mac OS 9, however the programmer plans to maintain it in his spare time. To get updates directly from him, go to the site listed below. If you have any other SpellTools concerns please go to the site below and send an e-mail msg to the programmer for assistance."

http://www.marciniak.com/spelltools/spelltools.html

However, discontinued or not, SpellTools is still advertised and downloadable from Newer's Website. I have not contacted Mr. Marceniak, who has apparently not updated his SpellTools Website since early 2000.

Which is too bad, because Spelltools looks like a nice program. Reader Tomas Jones writes:

"I like this program over the others for some of the features. It has a great text stamp feature. We do a lot of standard responses, and I love that feature. It also has tools for normalizing spaces and returns, as well as adding or stripping '>' characters."

SpellTools Features
• It is an application, not a slow and/or conflicting system extension
• Accelerated for Power Macs
• Provides a more sophisticated set of spelling algorithms
• "Prooflistening" (text-to-speech) reads your text aloud
• "Rubber Text Stamps" (text macros) for virtually all applications
• "Line Normalization" fixes bad line wraps
• "Caret Stripping" (removes ">")
• "Find & Replace"
• "Word Counting"
• "Case Changing" converts selected text to UPPERCASE, lowercase, Title Case, etc.

SpellTools is advertsed to work with nearly any application you own because it is itself an application, not an extension or control panel. Therefore, it will not conflict with other things in your System Folder. It is encoded FAT binary, so it works on older 68K Macs.

A small floating palette allegedly appears when it the program active, and contains all the Text Tools. I'll have to take their word for it, since I can't get the palette to appear.

System Requirements
• MacOS version 7.5 to 8.6 required (You can also download a OS 9 updater for SpellTools from Craig Marciniak's site, which I did, but to no avail.)
• 8MB of RAM or more
• Hard disk with at least 1 MB of available space

Stuff SpellTools can do for you, if you can get it to work:

• Spellchecking
- SpellTools handles problems like ROger but also allows for neologism like TrueType, catches double wording errors errors, has computer terms like "motherboard" in the dictionary, and ignores most HTML tags.

• Text-to-Speech
- By highlighting text and clicking the second button of the SpellTools palette speaks the text:

• Stamper
- The Stamp Tool allows you to set up rubber stamps of text that can be inserted into any document by clicking on the stamp tool pop-up and selecting the appropriate stamp from the menu. User defined stamps and standard date and time stamps are available from the menu.

• Cleanup Incoming E-mail
- Removes hard carriage returns causing paragraphs not to wrap

• Strip Extra Spaces
- SpellTools will strip superfluous spaces for you when you highlight text and choose "Normalize Spaces of Text Selection" or "Strip Leading Spaces of Text Selection" from the text tools pop-up.

• Garbage Removal
- Gets rid of unwanted ">" characters.

• Find & Replace

- SpellTools has a standard, case-sensitive, find and replace routine that works in any application.

• Word Counting
- Count the number of words, lines and characters of a text selection

• Case Changing
- SpellTools allows you to change the case characteristics of text by highlighting it and choosing "UPPERCASE the Text Selection", "lowercase the Text Selection", or "Capitalize the Text Selection" from the text tools pop-up. This feature is aware of diacritical things like "möbius", or contractions like "they're".

All very cool -- if you can get it to work.

SpellTools 1.3.3 (supports up to OS 8.6) can be downloaded here"
http://www.newertech.com/software/spelltools/index.html

The OS 9 updater for SpellTools is available here:
http://www.marciniak.com/spelltools/spelltools.html

Charles W. Moore

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