If you need a facility to spell-check your work without leaving your favourite wordprocessor, these are the products for you. Polish language modules from TIP company can be activated from within one of the mentioned above wordprocessors by clicking exactly the same button as you do for checking your English documents. All modules have spell-checking, thesaurus and hyphenation modules and built-in dictionary of over 750,000 Polish words and phrases. You can also add new words to the dictionaries and modify them to your specific needs.

The package does not include Polish fonts or keyboard driver. If you do not have them in your system yet - we recommend Zecer 2.1 which provides both and works well with this module. Make sure the Polish fonts in your system include Polish system fonts. They are necessary to show Polish characters in the spell-checker's dialog window. You can run the spell-checker without Polish system fonts without any decrement to your document, but you won't see Polish characters in the dialog windows.

In all versions of Windows (except the fully Polish one) there is a minor problem with spell-checking words beginning with 'z with a dot'. If you for example run spell-checker on "Zaruwka" it will not notice the initial 'z with a dot' and will report : "Not in a dictionary :

"aruwka". You can however still change this word to 'Zarowka' or tell the spell-checker to ignore it, so you do not lose any program functionality. All that happens is that spell-checker brings all words beginning with 'z with a dot' unnecessarily to your attention and you have to click "Ignore" button on each of them. The 'z with a dot' problem is well known to the authors of this spell-checker, but sadly there is nothing that can be done to fix it. This is why:

In codepage 1250, that is the set with Polish characters, 'z with a dot' has been allocated ASCII code 191, the same code as a reversed question mark has in international character set. Reversed question mark is an punctuation mark used in Spanish at the beginning of each question. When running its spell-checker, Word assumes that character 191 is a punctuation mark and eliminates it BEFORE passing the word to the spell-checker's dialog window.

Only Microsoft could solve this problem by preparing a new version of Word which would NOT eliminate character 191 from the spell-checker's dialog window. But even if Microsoft did so for the convenience of Polish users, it could face even more criticism from the Spanish community, unhappy that their reversed question mark goes to the spell-checker's window when it should not. In this deadlock situation we just have to learn to live with it.

Another minor problem is that Word 6.0 does not show 'Polish' on the list of supported languages (under Tools-Languages option) and it requires you to click on a language to run a spell-checker in that language. The authors have therefore attached all Polish functions to 'Finnish' entry on the list. That may look a little funny, but does not cause any problems at all (until you need to run Polish and Finnish spell-checking together).

In Word 7 'Polish' has finally appeared on the language list so Polish spell-checking options can be accessible under 'Polish'.

There is not (and there can not be) any other product free of the mentioned above problems. These modules are the only Polish spell-checkers available for users of English Word 6.0/Word 7 and despite their minor problems they do the job well.

• Polish Software Digest

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