Recent Changes and Additions to the Editor for Windows® Program:
The following list shows the latest changes first. To find out when your present version of Editor was created, run the program, click Help on the top menu bar, and select About EDITOR. The date and version number of your version are at the bottom of the window. All enhancements listed in the following paragraphs that were developed after the date of your version will be included in your next upgrade.
Jan-Mar. 2008 (v. 2.1.0)
Many of Editor's References windows now include information about APA and Chicago Manual of Style rules, as well as MLA standard rules,
where appropriate.
Although Editor's ability to find mistakes in using commas is limited—many uses of commas depend
on meaning rather than on phrasal structure—a new Reference screen discusses the most common comma mistakes that writers make.
Editor's POLISH database of common clichés and trite expressions in British and US usage now includes over 8000
items. No comparable list can be found on the Internet—one site claiming to have the largest collection anywhere
has fewer than 3500—and published books usually have 2000 or so. SPELL1's database of mistakes that standard word processors'
spelling checkers do not catch is now over 12500 items, most wildcarded so that the total estimated "catch" is now
over 21000.
July-Dec. 2007 (v. 2.0.0)
Editor 2.0 was released in early January, 2008. The new version
of Editor provides expanded USAGE dictionaries and enhanced analysis routines that increase the scope
and accuracy of Editor's coverage. Editor 2.0 finds well over 100,000 errors and writing problems in
47 categories and provides several new features for custom-tailoring the program.
Among the new routines in USAGE are checks for
• incorrectly formatted dates;
• double negatives;
• verb-particle redundancies like bulge out, connect up,
join with, and
hundreds more;
• mistakes in compounding and hyphenation: drop off and drop-off,
hang up
and hangup, middle-class and middle class, roundup
and round up; the
SPELL1 dictionary has over 5000 new entries since July of this year.
• correct handling of multiparagraph quotations;
• problems with missing punctuation.
New custom-tailoring options in USAGE allow
• adding up to 20 items of the user's choice to the counted-items list;
• creating a personal "exclude" list of words and phrases the user wants
USAGE to ignore;
• organizing USAGE output by sentence number rather than by dictionary
name (a feature we recommend only to experienced Editor users).
WORD LISTS options, previously expanded to flag repeated phrases and paragraphs, now include a way to find paragraphs
with excessive internal repetition.
The Manual has been thoroughly revised and the Reference and Help screens have been modified to reflect the new features.
Known bugs have been fixed, including the inability in some cases to scroll to the end of a file when output windows are
tiled horizontally.
The price of Editor 2.0 is USD $50.00. Domestic upgrades are $15.00, international upgrades $20.00. Customers
who purchased the pre-2.0 version of Editor during December at the price of $45.00, or who upgraded at pre-2.0 prices
in December, will receive free e-mail downloads of version 2.0 in early January.
(Customers must have an e-mail server
that will accept the download; see our FAQ on downloading for more information).
Feb.-June 2007 (v. 1.9.1)
This Web site now includes a selection of comments from our customers: see "Who uses Editor?" on
our FAQ page. We have further expanded and improved Editor's analysis routines, improved elements of the user
interface, and further augmented and refined the USAGE dictionaries, especially with more extensive information on proper
compounding. We can estimate Editor's scope at more than 95,000 writing problems, few of them uncommon or obscure.
Dec.-Jan. 2006-7 (v. 1.8.8)
Editor's dictionary databases now contain over 26,000 items. Including new routines in the SPELL2 analysis, the
scope of USAGE's analysis can be estimated at more than 90,000 identifiable writing problems.
Aug.-Nov. 2006 (v. 1.8.5)
A new Preferences feature allows changing the way DRAFT Output is displayed on screen in View Output. The output can
be single-spaced (displaying more text at one time) or double-spaced (the default), and paragraphs that are not indented
can be marked with [P] to make navigation easier. Editor now counts quotation marks correctly in multiparagraph
quotations and dialog, and knows both the US and the British conventions for punctuating around closing quotation marks: it will
complain when a US writer uses the British convention, and vice versa. There are many new USAGE dictionary entries,
including more words commonly misused like farther and further, corespondent, and anticipate
and expect.
We have modified the View Output window to show more text, and have made sure that feature works on monitor resolutions other than
the standard 1024 X 768 pixels. (Right-click on your desktop and click the Settings tab to find out what resolution you are
currently using.) At resolution 1280 X 1024, the View Output window displays 40% more text in either full or horizontally
tiled form.
Apr.-July 2006 (v. 1.7.0)
Work on expanding and refining the USAGE databases has continued steadily. Editor has a number of new
and revised internal routines that improve the precision of FIX, SPELL1, SPELL2, and other analyses. CONSIDER has
more-comprehensive coverage of frequently misused words like habit / custom, fortunate / fortuitous,
baneful / baleful, and so on. Editor is highly ranked by Google as "proofreading software" and by
TopTenReviews as "writing enhancement software."
Jan.-Mar. 2006 (v. 1.6.5)
Editor's Web site has a new Frequently Asked Questions page, and new links from the Upgrades page that will allow
payment for inexpensive Editor upgrades by credit card using a secure PayPal site.
Following intensive new dictionary research and development, Editor's databases of spelling and usage problems now
total more than 23,000 items. The USAGE dictionaries have been modified to include British spellings, so that
Editor now catches most cases where these usage problems include British spelling. Because Canadian, Australian,
and other anglophone writers use mixtures of British and American English spelling, their work is now covered by Editor's
analyses, as well. British writers who do not wish to be reminded when they use British spelling (as American English
writers are) can turn off these reminders with a single click in Editor's Preferences menu.
Sept.-Dec. 2005 (v. 1.6)
The Writer’s Manual has been revised and updated in both screen and print editions. Some of the Reference screens
have been revised for greater clarity and precision.
The Chicago Manual of Style says, “of ten spelling questions that arise in writing or editing, nine are probably
concerned with compound words.” Editor's coverage and handling of compounds are greatly improved.
When the program finds a phrase that should be compounded or hyphenated before a noun, for example, it checks whether
a noun actually follows that phrase in the text before issuing an error message. Editor also handles compounds
involving cardinal and ordinal numbers—forty five, ninety eight, “an eighteenth century bishop
” and “a fifth century iron pot” all get marked for hyphenation. Four year olds, color
terms like blue green, and many other such phrases are also marked.
The new site-license version of Editor, for use on servers and workstations in writing labs and classrooms, now prevents users
from making changes to the program’s Preferences settings that would affect subsequent users. Any user can change USAGE
or WORD LISTS preferences while using the program but in this version, the software restores its default preferences each time a
user exits.
New WORDLIST (renamed WORD LISTS) options can help writers find unnecessary repetitions of short phrases in their work and can
even flag repeated passages from six words to a paragraph in length.
Apr.-Jul. 2005 (v. 1.2.6)
We reorganized the SPELL1 dictionary to distinguish more clearly among entries that contain outright misspellings, those containing
commonly misspelled terms, and those identifying homonyms and near-homonyms that may not be misspelled but should be checked to make
sure.
Feb.-May 2005 (v. 1.2.5)
Editor now reads most files produced by versions 6 and later of Microsoft Works (Editor must be running in
Windows XP to do this). The software now also reads most RTF files.
Editor can usually handle files that include exotic characters such as Chinese or Hebrew, stored by word processors using
special coding. The program cannot read such languages but seldom stumbles when their characters occasionally show up in
otherwise ordinary English prose.
Since Oct. 2004 (v. 1.0.8), we have revised and expanded all the USAGE dictionaries except POLISH. FIX (problems with
grammar and usage) is 10% larger, TIGHTEN (wordiness, redundancy) 8% larger, SPELL1 (spelling problems) 18% larger, and CONSIDER
(possible poor choices of words and phrases) 10% larger. Since January 2004 (Windows v. 1.0), the USAGE dictionaries
have expanded by a cumulative 25%.
Dec.-Jan. 2004-2005 (v. 1.1.5)
The View Output button now opens the output-file display screen and automatically displays all output files from the current
Editor session, saving several steps for the reader who wants to work with more than one output file on screen at a time.
It is now easier, as well, to do a quick Editor check after changing a document.
Editor can now analyze document files of any practical length: there is no longer a limit on text-file size, though we still
recommend breaking long files into several shorter ones for purposes of convenience and then reassembling the revised texts in the
word processor for the final draft. A new USAGE category, with explanatory Reference screen, warns the writer if a title
or header is typed all in capital letters, a stylistic misdemeanor.
Editor no longer gives inappropriate warning messages when words like states
and babe are capitalized in proper nouns like United States and Babe Ruth. The Writer’s Manual
chapters have been updated.
Several bugs that have caused SPELL2 analyses of some files to crash the program are fixed. We would appreciate hearing
about other SPELL2 problems; given a copy of the file causing the problem, we can fix the program and send an upgrade right away.
Editor now adjusts its displays if a user chooses the larger 120-dpi character
size over Windows’s standard 96 dpi.
Feb-Oct. 2004 (v. 1.0.8 )
Many small modifications to the software are based on extensive and ongoing testing. Work on the USAGE dictionaries has
expanded them by about 15% since the January release.
Jan. 2004 (v. 1.0.1)
Editor for Windows®, version 1.0, is published by Serenity Software. This is a complete revision and upgrade of
the DOS and Macintosh versions previously published by the Modern Language Association (MLA).