This is release 4.0 Excalibur, August 5, 2001

Excalibur is a freeware spelling checker for the Macintosh that is
also LaTeX aware.

Features include:

- Mac OS X compatible.  You do not need Classic to run it.

- Excalibur will offer suggestions for how to correct a word.

- Excalibur can spell check the clipboard. This makes it a good
  spelling checker for any text based application such as Alpha or
  SimpleText.

- Excalibur also works with Eudora Pro, BBEdit, MT NewsWatcher,
  Communicate, Nisus Writer, AppleWorks (formerly ClarisWorks),
  WordPerfect, and any other program that supports Word Services.

- You can teach it about new LaTeX commands and environments that you
  define.

- You can create your own dictionaries.

- Works on any plain TEXT file.  (type TEXT)

- Works on formatted files via Word Services.

- You will need Mac OS 8.6 or higher to run Excalibur.

  Version 3.0.2 of Excalibur will run on System 7.1 or higher, but it
  requires the Classic environment on Mac OS X.  It is still available
  from the Excalibur ftp server.

  Version 2.6 of Excalibur is still available too.  It will run on
  System 6.0.5 or greater, and it will run on any Macintosh since the
  Mac Plus.

- The "Standard Dictionary" (American English) distributed with
  Excalibur has over 162,000 words.

- Dictionaries for atomic elements, biblical terms, biomedical terms,
  British English, Catalan, Danish, Dutch (both old and new
  spellings), French, German, HTML, Indonesian, Italian, life
  sciences, Manx Gaelic, medical terms, Norwegian, Portuguese,
  Spanish, and Swedish are available.  You can get these from
  <ftp://ftp.eg.bucknell.edu/pub/mac/Excalibur-dictionaries/>.

- If you're not a LaTeX user, you can get a copy of the manual in
  PostScript, HTML or Acrobat Reader (PDF) format from
  <ftp://ftp.eg.bucknell.edu/pub/mac/>.

  There is also an on-line HTML version of the manual.  Point your
  browser to

  <http://www.eg.bucknell.edu/~zaccone/Excalibur-manual/Excalibur-manual.html>

- If you want to receive mail notifying you when the next version of
  Excalibur will be available, let me know.  I will add you to my
  mailing list.  Send mail to <zaccone@bucknell.edu> and please
  include a valid e-mail address.

  You can also learn about current Excalibur versions by visiting the
  Excalibur home page:

  <http://www.eg.bucknell.edu/~excalibr/excalibur.html>

What's new in version 4.0:

- Carbonized

- Can't automatically open the clipboard yet.  This feature will
  return in a future release, if there's enough demand and after Apple
  has updated its manuals.  The options related to this are now dimmed
  in the Startup preferences panel.  This is to remind you that they
  aren't available.

- All program text now comes from a resource.  This makes it easier to
  localize.

- When running under Mac OS X, there is a cosmetic problem in the Edit
  Commands dialog.  The items in the number of arguments column don't
  line up.  I will fix this when Apple provides a means for doing it.

- Larger fields for flagged words.

- No more balloon help.  Sorry, but Carbon doesn't allow it!

- The Help menu is gone.

- Excalibur has new icons courtesy of William Adams.

- Added a section to the manual that explains how to use Excalibur
  with AppleScript.

Bugs Fixed:

- A word will be recognized as the same word regardless of how its
  accent is typed.  This applies to LaTeX users.

- Fixed a minor problem with translating a capital A with a grave
  accent into its TeX equivalent.

- Fixed a bug in the "guess word" Apple Event that prevented it from
  working if the optional parameter was missing.  Thanks to Rich Love
  for helping me find this.

Rick Zaccone
zaccone@bucknell.edu