Spelling

The pane to setup Balsa spell check options. Balsa uses the Portable Spell Checking library (pspell) to do provide an interface to the spell checking program of your choice. Currently there are modules for ispell or aspell, both of which can be found at the pspell website. For more information visit the Balsa homepage.

Pspell Module

The Pspell library allows you to use whatever spell checking engine you prefer, though the use of loadable modules. Currently Pspell has support for two modules, the traditional ispell, and the newer and more advanced aspell.

Ispell is most likely available on your system as it is a Unix standard, however Aspell is more advanced as it uses an advanced phonetics engine and adaptive techniques to learn how you tend to misspell words. More information is available at the Aspell website.

Balsa will attempt to use whatever module you specify here, however if the module is not installed it will not work and generate an error.

Suggestion Mode

The suggestion mode determines how hard the computer will search for suggestions for misspelled words. There are three options:

Fast

This mode quickly scans for replacements, which means it might be used by a good speller who occaisonally makes typographical errors.

Normal

The Normal mode is probably good enough for most people, it should produce the correct suggestion in the majority of cases.

Bad Spellers

The Bad Spellers mode is the most thourough and accurate mode, however it also takes the longest to find a list of suggestions.

Ignore Length

This provides the ability to ignore words shorter than a certain length. It may be useful to automatically skip short acronyms that are normally flagged as incorrect.