Hi Malcolm,

>Dealing with manually broken (hyphenated) words is a problem because, at least
>in English, people often glue individual words together into bigger compound words >using the same dash char ("-") as they do to split words.

>...I think it might be reasonable to treat dashes as word separators vs. hyphenated >word segments that need to be re-combined into a single word. Do you think this logic >could apply to German text as well?
WEll, there are many german words that are compund words without a hyphenation dash, but there are also words that have that dash intentianlly not only at the end of a line. So treating dashes as word seperator or "combinator" would be wrong.

>As for words with embedded periods: My suggestion is to treat these as
>abbreviations and not spellcheck them at all?
No, I tend to better recognize these and put them into the dictionary, as you observed yourself Word also spellchecks them.

Concerning upper/lower/proper/mixed case see the other posting.

Concerning legal stuff: I am also no lawyer, but there have even been issues with using a trademark typical _color_ only or with links including the expression "explorer" discussed in german news. Mercedes Benz and Coca Cola may be bad examples, as they are each 2 words, but you can easily think of one word trademarks like McDonalds, which is also a quite normal scottish name or let it be XeroX or Microsoft.

Me feelings is like yours, that it wouldn't inflict lawsuits to store such trademarks in a dictionary, but we may better be careful with such things. Copyright violation by decomposing text to words is also no issue in my feelings. At least when decomposing a text to it's letters I'd fully agree. But again we may have to be careful. The Lawcase and restrictions the "Ding" project went through are a case study: They were accused of stealing the dictionary, which was checked by some special and maybe intentionally misspelled words found within the dictionary as "watermarks". With a webcrawler I can easily tap into such a watermark word trap and the Spiegel might accuse me of stealing their content.

Bye, Olaf.