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Introduction

Sometimes, it would be nice to have an edit box with a spell checker and/or thesaurus built in, especially if you use edit boxes to enter longer messages (E.g. for logs, descriptions, IM messages, ...).

While searching the web, I found some free spell checkers, but most of them didn't work on Windows, or missed many language dictionaries. Then I found MySpell which is used by the free OpenOffice suite. It is distributed under a BSD license, which means you can use it in commercial applications. You just have to mention the copyright somewhere in your app.

And since MySpell is used by OpenOffice, there are dictionaries for almost every language available. And those dictionary files are compatible with the ones Mozilla uses.

I found MySpell, I started hacking on extending the CEdit control to make good use of it. Here's what the result looks like:

Usage

To use the CSpellEdit control:

1. Add the files SpellEdit.h, SpellEdit.cpp and all files in the MySpell folder to your project.
2. Replace all CEdit variables with CSpellEdit (don't forget to #include the SpellEdit.h file).

Since the default context menu of the edit control is replaced (see PJ Arends' article here on how to do that), you might want to translate those strings (default is English). To do that, you can add the following strings to your resource stringtable:

• IDS_SPELLEDIT_UNDO
• IDS_SPELLEDIT_COPY
• IDS_SPELLEDIT_CUT
• IDS_SPELLEDIT_DELETE
• IDS_SPELLEDIT_PASTE
• IDS_SPELLEDIT_SELECTALL

If those strings are not present, then the default English strings will be used.

Also: if no dictionary files are found or set, then the CSpellEdit control will do nothing, i.e. it will be exactly like the normal CEdit control.

Dictionaries

CSpellEdit searches for dictionary files at startup automatically. It looks for those files in the same directory as the program is and in the /dic/ subfolder. For example in:

• c:\program files\myapp\
• c:\program files\myapp\dic\

Since there could be many dictionary files in those folders, CSpellEdit first checks if there are dictionaries for the current user locale. If those are not found, then it looks for the English dictionaries. Example:

Current user locale is: de_CH
try Imyapp\de_CH.*
I
try Imyapp\dic\de_CH.*
I
try Imyapp\de_DE.*
I
try Imyapp\dic\de_DE.*
I
try Imyapp\en_US.*
I
try Imyapp\dic\en_US.*
I

If you don't want to store the dictionary files in your program's folder, you can set the paths to the dictionary files with the SetDictPaths() and SetThesaurPaths() methods.