Frequently Asked Questions
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Q: Why would I want use this service?
- You have just completed a brand new website and want to QA its content.
- You have just completed a set of product user manuals.
- Your considering the purchase of a website and want to QA it.
- Your have completely redesigned your website with new content.
- You have an existing website that has not been checked in some time.
- You want to see if your webmaster or website staff are doing their job.
- Your website content has a great deal of complex terminology.
Q: In what situations would this service be especially useful?
1. You are about to launch a brand new or redesigned website and you want to minimize your cutover issues. I've been apart of many technology project cutovers in the past. Anyone who has been a part of such an activity knows that solving as many issues as possible before cutover makes for a far better cutover experience.
2. You just finished a large batch of technical documentation and your document editor didn't have a robust technical term dictionary available. You didn't have time to verify that each term was spelled correctly, but you would like to perform a batch spell check before publishing your documents to the web or company intranet.
3. You are considering the purchase of a British website and you need a .CSV formatting file to convert British words to U.S. English to make your content more consistent.
4. You have foreign language web pages mixed in amongst English language pages and you need
to identify the foreign language web pages to move them to their own file system folders.
Q: What sets this service apart from traditional spell checking methods?
This service can process massive websites and document file sets having numerous document formats far more quickly than any manual effort. This service more than pays for itself by saving you the costs associated with hiring quality people, purchasing and installing spell check products (which may or may not work well), and managing such a task yourself. Also this service provides consistent results and can be employed 365/24/7.
This service has a highly refined detection and screening process that brings to light spelling and HTML tag flaws you should be made aware of immediately. Dictionaries have been forged and refined over time and are highly competitive with even the best and most popular spell checking software products and word processors. This drastically reduces the list of suspect / misspelled words; making the list much more manageable and far less time consuming to review. Smaller websites and document batches are preferred as massive collections can produce much larger results and a larger unrecognized words list.
Hyphenated words within the same document file are combined to prevent word syllables from appearing as misspelled words. However this service currently doesn't support combining hyphenated words between separate document files due to the complexity of determining if one document file is the continuation of another document file. In this case, word syllables will appear as misspelled words.
This service detects thousands of hyphened words having the format "syllable-word" such as "pre-orientation". This means that if your documents contain both "pre-orientation" and "preorientation" neither will be reported as a misspelling. Once again this saves you time when reviewing results. If you have ever plowed through the false positives of a sloppy spell checking process, you will know what I am talking about.
This service identifies and eliminates a vast number of Spanish, French and German words from it's results for multi-lingual websites containing both English and foreign languages. Again saving you valuable time when reviewing results and creating a local custom dictionary. File and folder name filtering criteria can be used to ignore documents that only contain foreign language content.
For example: The pattern "/espanol/" can be specified to not read the Spanish documents in that folder.
Many French and Spanish words are only one letter off from an English word. This makes it impractical to attempt to filter out all foreign language words. If your configuring a website; be sure to separate different languages into different file system folders to get the best results from this service.
This service includes extensive technical term spell checking -- ideal for technical websites and usually unavailable in most standard dictionaries. Terms include fields in computing, electronics, mathematics, mechanics, medicine, physics, general science and many more. This service provides exceptional results when it comes to accurately identifying industry specific terminology. Difficult words in other fields such as medical terminology are provided so that if you have human experts, they can assess their validity. Special foreign language characters and mathematical symbols are not supported.
This service has an extensive name database containing over 140,000 names of people, places, products and businesses.
This service does most of the work for you. There is no need to spend hours learning a new computer program or attempting to train employees on complicated technologies.
This service can incorporate U.S. English word lists you provide containing known valid custom words specific to your documents including context-based word pairs.
This service provides a .CSV formatted misspellings text file that contains the following fields for each suspected misspelling within a file:
"possible_misspelling", "fix_candidate_1|fix_candidate_2", "folder_location/file_name.ext"
Check
here to see an example.
Q: Do you provide samples so I can see if this service is any good?
Please see the "
Samples" page.
Q: What if I need help understanding the reports provided by this service?
Please see the "
Report Guide" page and you can always call for one-on-one assistance.
Q: What is the best way to contact you?
Use the e-mail address on the "
Contact" page.
Include the word "spellcheck" (as one word) in the subject line of your e-mail for priority service.
Q: Can I spell check my business database?
Method #1:
Business databases can be processed by exporting each desired field to an ASCII text file.
Dump one database field within a table to it's own text file and use an ".txt" file name extension when naming it. This allows you to determine which database field has a problem and then you can use a SQL query to locate the record in question to fix it.
Method #2:
Dump each record to a separate ASCII text file and name each file using a unique record key identifier. The characters in the record keys must be supported by the file system you are storing them in and by the POSIX UNIX file system. Convert the keys to MD5 or SHA checksum digest codes and use them as file names and add the ".txt" file name extension. This service would then identify records using the digest code which you would need to relate back to each unique record key.
If you have a better way to process your database that doesn't require any custom reprogramming of this service that would better fit your needs then please let me know.
Q: Does your service check for invalid hypertext links within my documents?Use the "
Free Tools" page on this website to perform a link check.
This feature is already widely available on the Internet in many instances for free.