MacProof                         proofreading, Macintosh
Proofread Your Own Mac Documents
 
Microbytes Daily News Service
Copyright (c) 1989, McGraw-Hill, Inc.
MacProof is a desk accessory for the Mac that detects errors and
provides correction suggestions for punctuation, capitalization,
spelling, word usage, writing style, and the structure of parts
of a text or a full document. European MacProof is an extended
version of the program designed for people writing in English as
a second language. It includes Language Interference checks to
detect and correct mistakes frequently made by those who speak
French and German but are writing in English.
 
The Interference Checks include False Friends, words that look
similar in the writer's native language and in English but have
different meanings; Noun Number, plural nouns that should be
singular (or vice versa) and incorrect plural forms; and Verb
Inflections, incorrect verb inflections.
 
The program also checks for usage problems, such as words that
may offend some readers; words that are possibly inappropriate to
general writing, that carry little specific meaning, or that are
easily confused with similar words; words that are used in spoken
English and are less acceptable in written form; redundant
words;or verbose words and phrases. You can also create your own
set of words and phrases that you want the program to flag.
 
In addition, European MacProof performs style and structure
checks, including checks for weak passive constructions; for
verbs that have been made into nouns by the addition of the
suffixes tion, ance, ence, or ing; for text displayed as a
numbered list of sentences; and for repeated phrases displayed in
a list or highlighted in the text.
 
MacProof and European MacProof run on the Mac Plus, SE, or II
with 1 megabyte of RAM and two 800K-byte floppy-disk drives or
one floppy-disk drive and a hard-disk drive. They are compatible
with most Macintosh word processors and are formatcompatible with
Aldus PageMaker, MacWrite, MacWrite II, MindWrite, and Microsoft
Word. If you use the programs with Aldus PageMaker or
MultiFinder, you need at least 2 megabytes of RAM.
 
Price: 295 Swiss francs.
 
Contact: Lexpertise Linguistic Software SA, Chateau de Vaumarcus,
CH-2028 Vaumarcus, Switzerland, 41-38-55-31-31.
 
                              --- Martha Hicks
 
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