Make a Specialized Dictionary

From the Inside Sesame Help Desk

One of the new features in Sesame 2.1 of greatest interest to us is the spellchecker. We are a medical practice and have a whole raft of specialized words that are not found in any normal spell checking dictionary. We have about 700 words that are special to our branch of medicine and our practice in particular. We have a list of these words which we were copy from our special dictionary that we use with MS Word. Is there any way to easily get these into the new spell checker in Sesame? This would be a real boon to our practice.
Antonina

Let's look at the Sesame spell checker dictionary first. It is simply a text file that has all the acceptable words listed, one to a line, in alphabetical order. The default dictionary is named dictionary.txt and is located in the Sesame start in folder - usually C:\Sesame2.

So, how to do you add your words to the standard dictionary? You could open the dictionary file in a text editor and add each of your words in the correct alphabetic order. This should only take you a day or two! But we have found an easier way to do what you ask. In fact, it took us about 15 minutes to add all of your words to Sesame's standard dictionary.

The key is that you already have a document that includes all, or a majority, of your words in it. So, let's use that. Make a new, simple, one field database in Sesame Designer that has a large multi-line field (just large enough so you can see what is being selected). Open it in Preview mode and add a record. At that point, paste your entire dictionary into that big field using Windows Copy and Paste. Now, in the Application Button menu, go to the Edit Commands and click on Spell Checker. This will open the new spell checker in the manual mode. It will highlight, one at a time, in its own window, every word that is not currently in the dictionary. As you click on the Add button, the spell checker will move on to the next word not in the dictionary.

As I said, it took me about 15 minutes to go through your entire listing.

When no more misspelled words are found, click on the Cancel button to close the spell checker. You now have a dictionary file that includes all of your special terms. You can give that file to every user on the system simply by copying it to their Sesame start folder.