What's New in TX Spell .NET for WPF 8.0
User dictionaries are the focus of TX Spell .NET for WPF 8.0: they load faster, take less memory and follow the character rules of the language. The version also lets you load a dictionary that users can't change in the options dialog.
Version 8.0 was released on December 2, 2020, together with TX Text Control X19. The version after it is Version 9.0. The blog article TX Text Control X19 and TX Spell 8.0 Have Been Released announced it.
Version 8.0 at a Glance
| Area | What is new |
|---|---|
| User dictionaries | Shorter loading times, a smaller memory footprint and support for special character flags |
| Dictionaries | Dictionary.ShowInOptionsDialog hides a dictionary from the options dialog |
User Dictionaries
A user dictionary, represented by the class UserDictionary, holds the words that users add, such as names and technical terms, in addition to the dictionary of the language. Version 8.0 changes two things about them.
- Loading time and memory. Adding a user dictionary takes considerably less time and memory than in version 7.0. Because TX Spell .NET checks against several dictionaries and user dictionaries at the same time, the saving grows with every user dictionary an application loads.
- Special character flags. Hunspell dictionaries, represented by OpenOfficeDictionary, support flags that define how characters are treated. User dictionaries now support them as well when the flags are defined at the beginning of the user dictionary file, and TX Spell .NET then checks text under these conditions.
The flags are WORDCHARS, BREAK and ICONV; User Dictionaries shows how to write them.
Hide a Dictionary From the Options Dialog
The new property ShowInOptionsDialog of Dictionary, the base class of all dictionaries, decides whether a dictionary is listed in the options dialog, where users can change it. A dictionary whose property is false, instead of the default true, is loaded as usual but doesn't appear in the dialog box. Hide or Rename a Dictionary shows it in code.
Spell Checking in TX Text Control X19
TX Text Control X19, released with TX Spell .NET 8.0, changed when a word counts as misspelled. Earlier versions underlined a word while the user was still typing it. X19 checks a word only once it is completed: when a delimiter such as a space or a period follows it, when the input position moves elsewhere, or when the document loses the focus. The blog article X19 Sneak Peek: Changes for Keyboard Layout and Spell Checking shows both behaviors.
Next Steps
- Version 9.0: the version that followed.
- Breaking Changes: what the new behavior of user dictionaries means for an upgrade.
- Version 7.0: the features of the previous version.
- Overview: what TX Spell .NET for WPF does and how its dictionaries work.