Improvements to the spell checker - it's not that useful now

[#1]

I know the text editor was not created by Lithium, but maybe something could still be done.

Our forum used to just have a plain text editor, and all Firefox users could use Firefox's inbuilt spell checker, which was pretty good.

Now in our latest version we use the standard spell checker and I have to say it's pretty poor.

- it is missing a lot of technology-related words so it is not of much use on a tech forum. For example in this post, it doesn't know "Firefox". Or "ok" - only "OK" in caps.

- it is in US English. We have a lot of UK visitors and they feel offended that their way of spelling is deemed "incorrect".

- it opens up in an ugly pop-up, is slow and sometimes gives a "ERROR: JSpell is already attached, or jspellInit has not been called before calling jspellCheck." error.

- it goes through the words one by one and that's just too annoying in a long post with lots of tech words that are written ok, but missing from the checker.

There's a few options:

-  Add UK spelling

-  Add more tech words. I can send in a long list for our forum, but I think they should be available for all other Lithium forums as well.

 - Somehow enable the browser spell check also for the graphical editor (it works in "Edit as html" ).

Message Edited by JuhisH on 04-02-2009 11:42 AM

[#2]

Hi Juhis,

I wholeheartedly agree. And I like your concept of enabling the browser spell check for the graphical editor.

In fact, now that IE 8 exists, I wonder whether more people would simply prefer to use the browser's own spell-checker. Having used the Firefox spell checker for a while, I never use an application's spell checker at this point since the browser does what I want. Any thoughts about that?

Cheers,

Phil 

[#3]

I totally agree, and we will have the same global  issue very soon.

Ideally, users should also be able to add words.  Or, at least the Admin should be able to add to the dictionary.

Thanks,

Kim

[#4]

Using the browser's spell checker is becoming fairly common.  As Phil suggests, what are your thoughts about encouragingthe use of the browser's spell checker instead? It is a pretty hard to find a spell checker for a language that has all the words that you want.

[#5]

Hi manjeerap,

"As Phil suggests, what are your thoughts about encouragingthe use of the browser's spell checker instead?"

Well that was kind of my point. The latest version of Lithium's graphical editor does not allow Firefox to perform the spell check. It works in "Edit as html" only. It used to work just fine on the plain text editor that we used before.

So yes, it would be great if the browser spell checker would work, but now it doesn't, at least on FF3.

[#6]

It would be also nice to be able to provide a list of commonly used terms for each community.  We have a lot of product names that could be added universally to the spell checker for us, but would not make sense for other communities.