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+About the "Italian Supplement" for Excalibur.
+
+
+The "Italian Supplement" spelling dictionary contains 184,000 Italian
+words and occupies 1.6 Mb on the hard drive. It isn't useful on its
+own because it doesn't contain basic vocabulary. However it can be
+used to supplement the 62,000 words in the "Italian Dictionary"
+provided by Paolo Matteucci. The two together give Excalibur access
+to a total of 246,000 Italian words.
+
+The "Italian Supplement" is not 100% accurate. Users who need maximum
+accuracy should stick to using just Paolo Matteucci's "Italian
+Dictionary". However people who need the extra words will find the
+"Italian Supplement" useful in spite of its having some defects.
+
+
+Installing the "Italian Supplement" for use with Excalibur.
+
+Put the "Italian Supplement" into the folder in which you keep
+Excalibur. If you prefer to store it somewhere else, put an alias for
+it into the folder in which you keep Excalibur.
+
+On Excalibur's Dictionary menu, choose Open Dictionary.... Navigate
+to find the "Italian Supplement', select it, and click Open.
+
+If you want the "Italian Supplement" to be opened automatically when
+you launch Excalibur in future, choose Preferences.... from the
+Options menu. In the Preferences window, check the box called Load
+currently active dictionaries. Click Save Now.
+
+
+About this revision.
+
+The "Italian Supplement" is a reduced and partly-revised version of a
+larger list of about 277,000 words which has been available at the
+Excalibur site since early in 1997. There were some problems with
+that very large list.
+
+- It didn't contain any accents. Words that ought to be written with
+ an accent appeared in their unaccented form. The list has been
+ searched for words that ought to have an accent, and so far as
+ possible the accented form has been substituted. It wasn't
+ practicable to search for every word that ought to bear an accent.
+ Almost all the accented parts of the future tense have been
+ corrected, and almost all words that should end in -t\`a. Some
+ accented parts of the passato remoto tense have been corrected or
+ added. Other words have been corrected if they were found, but the
+ result is patchy.
+
+- There were too many non-Italian words. Modern Italian is adopting
+ lots of non-Italian words, especially in the fields of sport,
+ popular music, and information technology. However the list looked
+ as if it included almost every foreign word that the original
+ compiler had come across, and the result seemed excessive. The list
+ was searched for words containing j, k, w, x, or y, and for words
+ ending with u or with a consonant. Some of them are genuine Italian
+ words, or words that have become a recognised part of modern
+ Italian. Most of the "good words" have been left as they were, but
+ many foreign intruders have been deleted. It wasn't practicable to
+ search for every non-Italian word. The list wasn't searched for
+ foreign words ending in a, e, i or o, so the "Italian Supplement"
+ probably still contains some non-Italian words.
+
+- There were too many words starting with A and B. This resulted from
+ the previous merger of two separate word lists. One of those lists
+ covered the whole alphabet and contained 245,000 words; the other
+ covered only the letters A and B and contained 32,000 additional
+ words. Most of the 32,000 extra "A-B" words have been removed from
+ the "Italian Supplement". They are available as a separate
+ collection. If you want them, look for "Italian A-B words" on the
+ Excalibur site.
+
+- It contained numerous words that were already included in Paolo
+ Matteucci's "Italian Dictionary". These words have been deleted
+ from the "Italian Supplement".
+
+Hyphenated words and Roman numerals have been deleted. A few spelling
+mistakes were found and corrected, but the list didn't seem to contain
+many mistakes. The main reference work used was Il Grande Dizionario
+Garzanti. The accents are generally as shown in that work.
+
+It is nice to have the opportunity to express appreciation to Rick
+Zaccone and Rob Gottshall for the indispensable program Excalibur, to
+Paolo Matteucci whose "Italian Dictionary" for Excalibur is invaluable
+in so many ways, not least in helping with this revision of the
+"Italian Supplement" list, and especially to Jacek Iwanski. His
+shareware program "Verbs & Nouns Lookup" handles bilingual
+dictionaries and verb tables, does word-for-word translation, and is a
+spellchecker too. A recent innovation in that program has made it
+practicable to remove defective and surplus words from the "Italian
+Supplement". If you'd like more information about his software, visit
+his home page at <http://users.netmatters.co.uk/dandaforbes>, or write
+to him at <jaceki@geocities.com>, or to me (see below). An
+English-to-Italian translation module is expected to become available
+in the near future.
+
+Anyone who wants to revise the "Italian Supplement" further is welcome
+to do so.
+
+Adrienne Forbes
+email: dandaforbes@netmatters.co.uk
+September 1998