I’ve just been evaluating the MapSpeller extension to ArcMap, at the request of Edgetech America. An employee there had noticed my admonitions to map makers to do spell checking and asked if I’d evaluate their product.*
The key thing about MapSpeller is that it is a location-sensitive spell checker. For example, you might tell it that “Peterson” street is spelled incorrectly and should be “Petersen.” When it spell-checks that area again on the same or on another map that you’ve made, it’ll remember that that location label is “Petersen.” If there’s another street on the same map named “Peterson” it’ll be able to differentiate the two. This is a great thing for massive map labeling projects. Their term for this feature is locationary. It also takes into account what words are not likely to be placed on a map but are similar to words that would be used on a map. For example, it’ll mark “sight” as a potential misspelling for “site”.
Using the extension was easy and intuitive. The only major downside was that the install process was a bit cumbersome in that you had to unzip and save three text files to a certain directory on your machine. It would be nice if that were automated. One license for the standard version is $295. The key difference between the professional and the standard versions seems to be that the professional version has the capability to spell check attribute tables while the standard version does not (it just spell checks what is on screen). Check out their website for other licensing options for large firms and the like.
There are plenty of customization options just like in full-featured word processing software. You can chose to have it not check words in all-caps, camel case, and/or upper-case. There are three English dictionaries to choose from: UK, Canada, and US (additional language dictionaries are planned, according to their website). You can also change the distance at which the locationary determines if a word is spelled correctly or incorrectly.
The really great thing is that there’s a full-featured evaluation version that lasts for 3 months. So it is definitely worth checking out!
*I was not paid for this review.
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