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Squiggly

Welcome to the preview release of codename “Squiggly.” Squiggly is a spell checking engine for Adobe® Flash® Player and Adobe AIR®. The Squiggly library allows you to easily add spell checking functionality in any Adobe Flex® 3 or Flex 4 based text control. The distribution package consists of a utility for building your own spelling dictionaries, a sample English dictionary, an Action Script package that checks individual words for spelling accuracy, and sample code that demonstrates “check as you type” functionality — see the online demo. While the included UI class requires the Flex SDK, the core spell checking engine can be used in pure Flash applications without any dependency on Flex packages.

We are making this early release of Squiggly available to the developer community to collect feedback on how much interest there is in text proofing functionality for Flash and AIR applications. Please give this package a try and let us know how we could better serve your needs by posting comments to the Adobe Labs Squiggly forum.

This release of Squiggly supports the Flash 10 runtime environment. However, as Squiggly is a technology preview release, Adobe does not make any guarantees for future releases of this package regarding backward compatibility of its APIs, product behavior, or runtime environments supported.

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Important note: The spelling suggestion algorithm for this release is based on English phonological rules. As such, it should only be used with an English dictionary for checking English text. The plan is to address this limitation in a future release of this project.

For a complete list of features and more information regarding this preview release, please see the release notes.

Getting Started

Follow these steps to get started with Squiggly:

  1. Download and Install Flash Player 10 or AIR 1.5.
  2. Try the online demo to become familiar with the functionality provided by Squiggly
  3. See the Product Details section of this page for more information about this release and to review the system requirements and release notes.
  4. Download the Squiggly package. Expand it into your Flash development environment and review the Squiggly ASDoc, along with the sample code.

  5. Ask questions and share your feedback in the Squiggly forum

    Please note that your submission of comments, ideas, feature requests and techniques on this and other Adobe maintained forums, as well as Adobe's right to use such materials, is governed by the Terms of Use.

Community

Below you'll find references and links to help you participate in the Squiggly community.

Online Forum

Ask questions and discuss ideas with other Squiggly users in the Labs forums.

Please note that your submission of comments, ideas, feature requests and techniques on this and other Adobe maintained forums, as well as Adobe's right to use such materials, is governed by the Terms of Use.

Resources

If you want to learn more about releases on Labs as well as other Adobe technologies, visiting a user group or connecting with an Adobe Community Expert is a great place to start.

Product Details


Documentation

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FAQ

What is Squiggly?
Squiggly is a spell checking engine for Flash Player and Adobe AIR®. The Squiggly library allows you to easily add spell checking functionality in any Flex 3 or Flex 4 based text control. The distribution package consists of a utility for building your own spelling dictionaries, a sample English dictionary, an Action Script package that checks individual words for spelling accuracy, and sample code that demonstrates “check as you type” functionality — see the online demo.
What languages does Squiggly support?
The spelling suggestion algorithm for this release is based on English phonological rules. As such, it should only be used with an English dictionary for checking English text. The plan is to address this limitation in a future release of this project.
Do I have to use Flash CS4 Professional or Flex to use the Squiggly library?
The spell checking engine of Squiggly is written in ActionScript 3.0 and does not have a specific dependency on Flash CS4 Professional, Flex or any other framework. The UI class for Squiggly requires the Flex SDK v3.0 and above, but it is possible for developers to write their own UI controls without any dependency on the Flex SDK.
Why doesn’t your demo application recognize some very common words that are properly spelled?
The detection capabilities of Squiggly are directly related to the quality of your dictionary. Due to intellectual property (IP) rights issues, Adobe is not in a position to re-distribute professionally compiled spelling dictionaries. The dictionary included in this release is based on the free Spell Checking Oriented Word Lists (Copyright 2000-2004 by Kevin Atkinson) that can be downloaded from http://wordlist.sourceforge.net/. This dictionary is included purely for the purpose of demonstrating Squiggly’s functional capabilities. Users are encouraged to build their own custom dictionaries using the dictionary creation utility bundled with this package.
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System Requirements

The Squiggly library has been tested with Adobe Flash Player 10 and AIR 1.5. General system requirements for Flash Player are available on Adobe.com. General system requirements for AIR are also available on Adobe.com.

Squiggly does not contain any platform specific code. As such, it should work similarly across all platforms that the Flash Player 10 runs on.

See the release notes for the complete system requirements and known issues with the supported systems for the Squiggly library.

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Release Notes

This release of Squiggly is a technology preview and is designed for evaluation purposes only. The software contained within the download is not final. While the functionality is fairly complete, Adobe does not make any guarantees for additional future releases of this package, nor for backward compatibility of its API, product behavior, or runtime environments supported.

The release notes document known issues related to the alpha versions of the Squiggly library.

See the complete Squiggly release notes

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