Àp JÀDOC for LEXLEX.SUP By Paula Giese, CompuLex Services LEXLEX is a word list of more than 20,000 legal and medical terms, and common "lawyerİused abbreviations" (such as states, abbreviated "Minn" instead of MN, etc.) in a form easily compiled with WordPerfect's SPELL.EXE dictionary maintenance program. The origin of LEXLEX, several years ago, was a compilation of such words by Maryland attorney Mike Stevens, several years ago. Since obtaining Mike's original listingİİwhich was a set of files broken down into A_BWORDS.TXT, C_DWORDS.TXT, etc., for use with just about any spellchecker, I've expanded it somewhat over the years, and have converted it into one list suitable for compilation in what seems to me the only wordprocessor any law office should be using. Because WordPerfect has many lawyers as purchasers (and is the "official" WP of the U.S. Justice Department), they've made special effort to include a number of "our" terms in their largerİthanŞaverage spellcheck dictionary, LEX.WP. But it's by no means complete. How to put these into your dictionary: They've been checked for correct spelling, but you might want to retrieve the file into WP and scan through it (it'll take up more than 300 "pages"). You needn't bother to delete the more obscure terms, because when we compile this list into LEX.WP, WordPerfect's very efficient method of coding is not going to increase the size of LEX.WP appreciably; it will still even fit on an old 360K floppy, for transfer to all the standalones in your office, if desired. 1. Copy or move LEXLEX.SUP into your \WP subdirectory, and make sure SPELL.EXE (which is not used by the WP.EXE program to check spelling, but only for "dictionary management") is present. SPELL will work fastest if it has the maximum RAM available, so get rid of any TSR's hanging about. 2. Run SPELL. A menu will appear. Select ADD WORDS TO DICTIONARY. 3. A number of options for "adding words" will appear. WP supports a "common word list" for superİspeedy lookups; we don't want LEXLEX there (lawyers' jargon notwithstanding). Neither do we want these terms in one of the "special" dictionaries WP supports, where you would put "transient" terms such as client names, geographical or technical specifics for one "big" but rather shortİterm purpose. Choose menu item 4, ADD WORDS FROM FILE TO MAIN DICTIONARY, and tell SPELL that the file is named LEXLEX.SUP. Take a look at the clock. 4. SPELL will begin showing you what it is doingİİ"writing"ÜfÜ alphabeticallyİgrouped words. All very well and good, but when it comes to the y's, you will see no disk activity light, the system just sits there. Surely it is hung, perhaps I should.... 5. You should go have a cup of coffee, or do something else for a half hour. (If you have a fast system maybe it will be only 20 minutes). SPELL is hashcoding this long list of words, inserting them its dictionary, and modifying the dictionary's index (the dictionary is a specialİpurpose database, tightly integrated with WP routines). In short, your computer is doing a computationİintensive task, and does not want to be bothered until done. 6. When it is done, you'll see the main SPELL menu again, 0 quits the SPELL program, and your dictionary has now been updated with that long list of words. Moreover, SPELL has collated the new words, so if by chance some of them were already in there, they aren't duplicated. Now that they're "in the (coded) dictionary," rather than as some of them might be, in {WP}LEX.SUP, that you create yourself, by telling WP to "add word" everytime its spellchecker finds some terminology of yours that you know but it doesn't recognize, the spellchecker will recognize many "root/ending" combinations, such as plurals. ===== Making your own special terminology lists No doubt the easiest way to do this is by "what comes naturally" when you run the spellchecker on your docs and keep telling it to "add word". The file {WP}LEX.SUP gradually builds in size. And as it does, spellchecking slows down markedly. Every so often, pull it into WordPerfect, check its contents for misspellings, delete the ones you really don't want in the main dictionary, compile {WP}LEX.SUP, and delete the old one (a new one will be automatically created, the first time you ADD an unrecognized but correct word). More systematically, especially if you are working on a client matter that has a large specialized vocabulary, so that much of your correspondence and other docs is always evoking "unrecognizeds", such as complex medical or technical matters; foreign country matters; a large but frequently referneced number of personal or other "names" and the like, just type in these words, ending each with a [HRt] hard carriage return into a standard WP file. Make sure the cursor is at the beginning of the last line (that is, a [HRt] ends the last word entered this way). You do not have to alphabetize the words the way WP does it for you in {WP}LEX.SUP; SPELL will do that. Use SPELL (as above) to compile this list into either the main dictionary, or use CHANGE/CREATE to create a special dictionary just for this "special" wordlist. In fact, I don't recommend this. That was a necessity "in the old days" when systems were floppyÜfÜ based, and space was limited. You could keep your dictionary from overrunning the limited 360K disk size, and maybe even fit it on the smae floppy as your old version of WP (or other WP's). No one should be using floppyİbased systems any more, and even if you want LEX.WP on your laptop's 3 1/2" drive, its 720K and WordPerfect's very efficient compiler will probably allow quite large wordlists to compile into LEX.WP and still fit on the same 3 1/2" floppy as WP.EXE, its printer info, and a bunch of macros, leaving drive b: for a blank floppy to hold the text work you're doing on your laptop. So there is really no reason for "special" dictionaries any more. There is no need to clutter LEX.WP with transient cleint names, however; {WP}LEX.SUP can handle a great many of those for a long time. If you create additional specialized spellchecking wordlists such as medical, additional legal terms, technical, geographic, etc., please upload them to LawCAT and share your work with other lawyers! Don't upload a "compiled" LEX.WP, but rather just the list, so other lawyers can check it over for their purposes. Note: if you have a random wordİlist put together in some way other than "dumping unrecognized words with ADD to {WP}LEX.SUP, which does its own sorting you can use WordPerfect's SORT ,2,NAMEFILE.WP (where NAMEFILE is the filename of your WordPerfect formattedİandİsaved file. If you have an "ASCII" textfile that is a list of words someone else created, import it ,2 ("CR/LF becomes HRt"), save it in WordPerfect format, then sort it (for editing) or compile it directly. Make sure to jump to the end of any such file and delete any stray characters, such as extra ^Z's or a lot of @@@ (or anything) that may appear. Use to check for stray codes at the top of the file also. There should be no codes, either random garbage or WPİformat commands in Line 1 Position 1, which should be the first letter of the first word. You do not need to reset margins to 0,something (which places codes at the start of most files, which use defaults of 10,74 or 16,112, depending on fonts).