[ Fabrizio Oddone | Italian Recipes | Ricette Italiane | Y2K | Site Map | What's New ]

RH Unabridged and Webster's Patches

Last updated: April 5, 1998

The latest versions are labeled after the great German composer Johann Sebastian Bach, because they were released on his 311th birthday.

Download URLs:

They patch the RH Webster's 1.0 or 1.5 desk accessory (part of the Random House Webster's Electronic Dictionary and Thesaurus, College Edition) and the RH Unabridged 1.0 or 1.1 desk accessory (part of the Random House Unabridged Electronic Dictionary) in order to:

• fix the infamous bug causing a crash when you click on the definition text field
• let the dialog boxes show true grays instead of patterned grays
• let the desk accessory run without the RH Extension installed

Caveats:

• RH Unabridged always locks up when looking for words in the range beginning with unip and continuing to the end of the u portion of the dictionary. There is nothing I can do about this pitfall.
• RH Unabridged may crash when performing wildcard searches, definition searches or anagram searches. RH Unabridged may lock up in other situations as well. Again, there is nothing I can do about it.
• Some crashes can be eliminated by disabling ATM.

You can put the dictionary files anywhere, provided that the desk accessory resides in the same folder (you can still put an alias to the desk accessory in the Apple Menu Items folder).

Caution: the patcher works by modifying the existing, original copy. You may want to backup an unmodified original copy for future reference (or in case something goes wrong...).

It took me nearly one hour to fix the bug (disassembling with MacsBug and ResEdit like crazy...) -- this means that the guys who have the source code could have achieved the same result with less work. Needless to say, this raises serious doubts on their technical support quality.

This patch application was made with ResCompare, a free resource comparison and patch generation utility. ResCompare can be FTP'ed from most Macintosh archive sites. Send inquiries regarding ResCompare to Michael Hecht.