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Thanks to all the helpful people who helped me on this.
Bottom line so far: The only one I could download and test without buying
was TextPad (thank you, Nancy Kaminski). It's a cute text editor, doesn't
take up huge amounts of disk space, and includes downloadable spelling
checkers for several languages. It means I have to cut and paste the text in
my Word document to check it in TextPad, because it isn't a Word Plug-in
(unlike some other packages that were recommended to me). But at $27 to
register, it represents the best value (the Word plug-in weighed in around
$80).