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I've been using TextPad's spell-check happily for months, but now I can't. The tools menu has "Spelling" grayed-out, and F7 does nothing. I open various types of documents in different classes, select all, none or some of the document, ensure the preferences has spell-checking boxes checked (both under general and document classes), and I've even re-downloaded TextPad, but nothing helps. Now I've noticed that Sort is similarly disabled. How did they get disabled? Is there some way to re-enable them via Configure>Preferences>Tools?

The Sort issue may be normal based on highlighted text.

I have noticed that Sort is ghosted out if I have selected one or more characters on a line, and Block Select mode is off. If more than one line is selected, then Sort is available. That seems normal. If not selecting more than one line, there is nothing to be sorted. If Block Select mode is on, then Sort is not grayed out. It is also easy to see this by looking at the icon for Sort on the Toolbar. You can see it toggle on/off as you go from line to line.

I have no ideas on Spelling. If the dictionary is missing, you get an error message, but it is not ghosted out.

Hope this helps with Sort........good luck.

You probably know this.. Spell checking and sorting are disabled in a read-only window (such as "Command Results")

I have no spell checker either. I got a new machine, downloaded and installed 4.6.2 and no spell check. I haven't hit on a way to make it work. I tried downloading the dictionary again and messed around with the config but still nothing.

I found the solution to my spell check problem. I had a syntax file of syn.syn for my text files. I changed it to text.syn and now I have spell check working. I must have mis-set it when I was setting up.

I've found the cause of my problem. "bbadmin" (response below) is right.

A coworker is using an ancient editor that (besides automatically adding a control-Z end of the file) is setting read-only attribute. This disables Spelling and Sort in TextPad; removing the read-only re-enables them.

This is reasonable behavior on TextPad's part, though some more obvious indication of the situation when I attempted the Spelling or Sort would have helped me, at least.

Thanks for all the help.

Albert,

TextPad 4.x doesn't treat Ctrl+Z characters specially, so it shouldn't affect sorting or spelling. Check that the files are not read-only ("Read", on the status bar), because that definitely would disable those commands.

Incidentally, a simple sort of a file containing a line starting with Ctrl+Z would move it to the beginning of the file (after any empty lines), which some DOS applications would treat as the end of the file.

Keith MacDonald
Helios Software Solutions

I keep getting this error when I click "add" during spellcheck to add a word like "listserv" or other words: "error writing to a dictionary".

What am I doing wrong?

I thought maybe my files in c:\Program Files\Textpad 4\Spelling were write-protected but I checked them and they're not.

Thank you.

Just out of curiosity, do you have permission to update that file? If it's a home computer, it's probably a non-issue but in a work environment, you may have insufficient privileges.