Antidote 10 User Guide

 Attention — This page presents content from an old edition. Consult the documentation for the current release instead.

User Guide / Foreword

Foreword

Antidote 10 is the result of over 25 years of progress in language engineering, underpinned by the four key values that first forged its reputation: consistency, scope, simplicity and accessibility.

Consistency. Antidote is a one-stop, multi-resource platform for anyone who writes in English, including an advanced corrector, a set of rich dictionaries and detailed language guides. All these resources aren’t just pasted together; they are carefully designed to complement one another and interact intelligently to help you explore every aspect of a language question. Individually, each of these resources rivals the best in its category. Together, they are simply unmatched.

Scope. The resources in Antidote have some impressive figures to offer: 110,000 words, 700,000 combinations, 1,500,000 synonyms, 8,500 verbs, 16,000 targeted errors and much more. It all adds up to a real treasure trove of information. Each resource comes with a host of useful functions, such as the 200 filters in the corrector and the many search modes in the dictionaries.

Simplicity. All the resources appear in just three windows. Each window clearly lays out the functions with minimal buttons, complemented by all sorts of clever, handy options just when you need them. The result is a simple, quick and effective correction process. Antidote is powerful but clean and easy to master.

Accessibility. Antidote is accessible directly from your document with a simple mouse click or from a menu. No files to send or convert, no time wasted. You’re busy writing, something nags you: you just click and Antidote comes to your help. It’s like having an English expert living inside your computer.

Antidote 10 comes with a number of key improvements to all of its resources.

The synonym lists are now sorted by proximity with the headword, giving you quick access to the most relevant alternatives. They can also be ordered alphabetically, by frequency or by length. New filters allow you to choose which types of synonym to show, making it simpler to spot what you’re looking for.

Proverbs can be searched by theme, for example love, money or power. Expressions are shown as soon as you type them in, with no need to perform a multiword search.

It is now even easier to share Antidote’s rich resources by creating word lists (mammals, monkeys, etc.) or article lists (negation, capitalization, etc.) that can be sent to other users. These users can then import the lists into their own copies of Antidote to view or edit them.

Binge-watch, facticide and hoverboard are among more than 6,000 new words added to the English nomenclature; meanwhile 120,000 new synonyms and 125,000 antonyms complete the panoply of English dictionaries. The guides now comprise more than 480 articles, with a cleaner, more attractive display.

Style correction in Antidote boasts a number of enhancements. You no longer have to leave the Style view to correct language errors. More than 3,500 detections have been added, such as split infinitives and wordiness. When flagging repeated words, the corrector provides a menu of the most relevant synonyms, making it easy to vary the text’s vocabulary. A new readability filter displays a selection of the most common indexes as well as the new Antidote score. To help improve readability, the filter underlines all the elements that can make a text overly complex: long words and sentences, rare or foreign words, abbreviations and nested phrases. A little work on the highlighted elements can greatly improve your text’s readability.

In response to growing demand, a new filter for gender neutrality has been added. It helps writers remove bias in their texts by using neutral terms whenever gender-specific terms are not necessary. It flags nouns, pronouns and determiners specific to a particular gender, such as job titles or terms of address, and suggests more inclusive alternatives.

Thousands of improvements to the lexical and syntactic analysis now enable even smarter language corrections. Bold and italic type are recognized and displayed; especially useful when italics are used to designate foreign words, for example. Emojis are also displayed thanks to the analyzer’s full conversion to Unicode. The tooltips display clearer error diagnostics and more specific possible actions.

With the new optional synchronization service, you can now sync favourites, word lists and personal dictionaries across all your devices that use Antidote.

In total, Antidote 10 sees more than 75 new features added to its content, functions and interface, making this edition a more solid and complete language tool than ever before.

But that’s not all! Antidote 9 was the first edition to open up the dimension of English to its users, who had already been enjoying Antidote in French for many years. Now, those who purchase both language modules will see them interact. The definitions dictionary displays more than 800,000 translations for all of its words, expressions and proverbs. Even more impressive is the tour de force achieved by our linguists, who have translated 1,700,000 combinations in both directions, with examples. Never before has a new edition of Antidote been so rich in new content.

The French module itself benefits from 60 improvements, including French versions of the new features described above. Cuichette, inclusivité and sociofinancement are among the 1,000 words and expressions added to the dictionaries, while the guides now comprise 850 articles.

We therefore invite you to discover Antidote, now in its 25th year and our greatest vintage yet – whether in French, English, or the winning combination of both languages.