I have long wished that Userland provided onboard spell check support for Frontier and Radio. Now, I am not so sure I mind - or, at least, when I'm not working on a Mac.

MicroSpell  is one weird, interesting, messy, powerful, fun little product. Dix mentioned that it reminded her not a little of Radio itself. I agree. The product supports Windows users under Windows 95/98/NT/2000 and NP. These guys are serious too. They support a LaTeX mode and offer integration to Emacs users as well. I said 'weird', didn't I?

Go ahead and download this product. They do want you to pay eventually but allow you to set your price based on its perceived value to your work and the frequency with which you use it. I am going to pay up without question.

MicroSpell can seem intimidating at first. It offers a blizzard of features - so many that you might be tempted to give up on this product. I found myself wondering whether correcting my spelling wasn't just a wee bit too much trouble .... don't give up!

I offer here a simple tutorial for correcting spelling errors in Radio using MicroSpell.

1. Be sure you select Source mode in your text entry area.

This is vital, especially if you have any links created in your text. The example below does use WYSIWYG mode, which is fine in this case because I am sending text only to the MicroSpell application.

If you try to use WYSIWYG mode with MicroSpell, it will appear to leave your HTML links untouched visually (or at least this was my experience) but your actual underlying link code will be wiped away by the spell checker. You can still enter your text in WYSIWYG mode - just change to Source mode when you are ready to check your spelling.

2. Select the text you want to check and copy it to the Windows clipboard (CTRL-C) will work.

3. Select 'Check Word or Clipboard Text'. This will load the selected text into a MicroSpell window. IMPORTANT: when you install MicroSpell, the product offers you the option of checking words in the Clipboard as well as in the full-blown version of MicroSpell. Be sure you select that option if you want to follow my tutorial. Of course, the full version of MicroSpell offers a bazillion ways to correct mistakes.

4. MicroSpell identified an incorrectly spelled word in its popup window.

5. MicroSpell offered another window with some guesses about a correct spelling. Generally, their guesses are reasonable. Someone needs to catch them up quickly with weblogging.

6. None of the guesses fit, so I selected the 'Replace with ...' option. I had to enter the correct spelling myself in this case. When I was done, I selected 'Close'.

7. I selected 'Done - Copy to Clipboard' so MicroSpell would apply the changed text to my copied text.

8. I returned to the text entry area in Radio, reselected my text and typed CTRL-V (the text replacement command in Windows). Done.

MicroSpell has many modes and features. I could have gone to a dictionary and entered 'blogger' so that correct spellings of this term would not be flagged in the future. MicroSpell can even look up words in multiple dictionaries located on the Web as well as within its own distribution.

You may also be thinnking ... I don't have time to go through 8 steps to correct my spelling. While this may have seemed like a lot of steps to check spelling - and it was - MicroSpell will find and list all spelling errors within a file at the same time. Also keep in mind that MicroSpell will work in ALL your Windows applications as well as within your browser. You can also create simple scripts that automate the spell-check process to suit your style. And yes, wait, there's more.

(Did I mention that MicroSpell can follow linkages and spell check entire websites ...?).