[Users]
[Developers]
Word Services Developer Page
Word Services is good for developers because it saves you time, money, memory and
disk space. Instead of licensing an expensive OEM speller you can just let
your users know where to get a Word Services speller. Even if you choose to
bundle a Word Services speller, you do not need to spend time debugging and
integrating someone else's weird code. You do not need to allocate memory
for the speller within your application partition, and you don't need to
take up valuable space on your distribution floppies with a big dictionary.
Word Services is particularly good for developers who write vertical, "in-house"
or low-volume applications. Without Word Services you probably could not afford
to license an OEM speller. Now you can use the protocol and buy only
the spellers you actually need.
Word Services is free - no license fee or nondisclosure agreement is
required to use it. You can download the protocol specification from
here (or read it as a Web page), and you can get the complete source
code to Writeswell Jr., a simple Word Services word processor.
The protocol is designed to be easy for the client (word processor) to
implement.
Working Software developed the protocol in cooperation with their
competitors in the spelling business, as well as several word processor
and grammar checker publishers, and Apple Computer, Inc.. It is supported by a number of
applications,
and servers are available from various companies in English, French, German,
Russian, Czech, Polish, Hebrew and Turkish.
The Word Services Consortium
The Word Services protocol standard has not changed in several years. It is
great that it works so well that changes have not been urgently needed, but
there are things we would like to do with the protocol. In addition, we are
implementing Word Services on the Be
operating system. To do this we need to form a committee to develop and
agree on the new standards. This is the Word
Services Consortium
Also, it would be very helpful to keep all the Word Services developers in
touch with each other. For this reason we are providing an on-line contact database that the developers may use to find each other.
There is no cost to join the consortium, and there's nothing you
particularly have to do.
Word Services Web Pages
To learn about Word Services, I suggest you read these documents in the
order listed.
Word Services Information for Downloading
The formatted documents for downloading are in Word 5.1 format. The Word
Services SDK
provides double-clickable Common Ground documents, so that you need
not possess a particular word processor to view and print them.
The Word Services Software Development Kit is now split into three files. Get the Spellswell Demo appropriate for your machine, and also get the Word Services client source code. The executables are built for both architectures in the client zip file.
You may download:
These can also be had from Michael Crawford's mirror site at Scruznet:
[Users]
[Developers]