How to set up different "lexicons" in Penfriend to predict for different users and topic areas
There are times when you need to have topic-specific words on hand in your predicted word list, but you may not wish to have them predicted all the time. Follow these steps to create different “lexicons” (the name used by Penfriend for its dictionaries). Use this same process for creating lexicons for different users of the program to accommodate their individual needs.
- Open Penfriend
- Show>Preferences and make sure “Learn new words” is checked. Click OK
- File>Open Lexicon
- Choose the lexicon which you wish to be the base dictionary into which you will add your topic specific words. (The Default lexicon starts with 2000 words; Teens lexicon starts with 1000 words and the Kids lexicon starts with 500 words). Click OK
- Then save this lexicon under another name by using the File>Save As … option. Name it according to the subject area for which it will be used, for example, if you plan to predict words for science, name it “science.lex.”.
- Show>Lexicon to see the Lexicon window
- Using the Lexicon Menu>Learn text file, you can automatically import topic specific words from a pre-typed text file. Navigate to the text file on your computer and click OK to start automatic importing of any words not already included in the lexicon.
- Lexicon>save to save those changes.
- At the end of this process, you may wish to go back into Show>Preferences in the Penfriend window and turn off the “Learn new words” option, if you do not wish for this new lexicon to start learning new words from the text typed by the student.
- You also may wish to go in and individually edit the prediction frequencies of certain words. You would do this if you particularly wanted some words to appear ahead of others. In the lexicon window, just double click on each of the words you wish to edit.
- Next time you open Penfriend, this last loaded lexicon will be loaded automatically. To choose another one, simply go to File>Load Lexicon and choose the preferred lexicon.