

Give HN: Proofreading Bookmarklet that Works Here - raffi
http://blog.afterthedeadline.com/2010/01/08/spell-and-grammar-check-bookmarklet/

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RyanMcGreal
I'm using it in Firefox 3.5.7 on Windows XP (behind a proxy server). A couple
of observations:

* It flags spelling and grammatical errors but when I click on a fix suggestion for a grammatical error, it does not apply the fix.

* Browser slows down to a crawl while the proofreading bookmark is in operation.

Great concept; I would love to use it if you can address these issues.

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raffi
Hi Ryan, What's the exact text you posted? I tried this in FF 3.5.7 on Windows
XP Pro and everything worked as expected.

\-- R

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RyanMcGreal
Hi Raffi, thanks for the follow-up.

It's actually the comment that I posted above, except that I started it with
"Im" instead of "I'm". It noticed the missing apostrophe, but didn't apply
"I'm" when I clicked on that option.

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raffi
Thanks. You just helped me find and fix a bug in my jQuery extension. I
generate a link useSuggest("'" + suggestion + "'") which broke with the single
quote. :)

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RyanMcGreal
Glad to help! Thanks for being so attentive to feedback and timely in
responding.

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NikkiA
Seems to be broken atm, clicking on the bookmarklet-induced icons gives 'No
writing errors were found' no matter what typos or grammar mistakes are
present. I'm guessing the back-end can't handle the load at the moment or
something.

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raffi
Could be your browser. What version are you using? I promise the load coming
from here is nothing compared to the number of users on WordPress.com.

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ErrantX
I get the same behavior.

Google Chrome V4.0.249.43

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raffi
Thanks. Just downloaded Google Chrome. (I tested in Safari and FF). Will see
what's going on.

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j_b_f
I'm having the same issue on Chrome/Mac 4.0.249.49.

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mmelin
Seems to work well here. But I don't see how it didn't suggest "hello" as a
possible correction of "helo"?

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raffi
You know, by commenting like this you're inviting me to chime in. Which means
I might not shut up. ;)

Most spell checkers take the word you typed and generate some number of
suggestions. Typically this is done by finding every word you can get from the
misspelled word by making one or two changes. These changes are usually
deleting letters, inserting letters, transposing letters, and changing
letters.

What can we get from "helo"? help (o to p), hello (insert l), hell (delete o),
etc.

Which one is the best one to choose? You're claiming that "helo" should always
be hello.

Most spell checkers have some heuristic they use to rack and stack words. They
may take into account which types of mistakes people make most often. This
type of spell checker may say that a missing letter is a more likely error
than accidentally changing an o to a p. Actually this is a bad example because
o and p are next to each other on the keyboard. So some spell checkers would
probably rate this error as very likely.

After the Deadline doesn't work like that. It looks at edit distance (how many
changes were required) and it looks at how well the suggestion fits the
context of the misspelled word.

If you type: "helo" by itself. AtD suggests help. Fine. How is AtD supposed to
know you want hello when there are so many other good candidates?

So what does AtD do? It looks at context. Try these examples with AtD:

I need helo.

Make sure you say helo.

I helo my darling.

Now try these in your favorite writing software. Any one is fine with me. Go
to MS Office, Firefox, Chrome, GMail, Apple text editor. You'll see the
difference.

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mmelin
Thanks for the reply and insight. To be fair, I didn't mean that helo should
always be corrected to hello, but that it should appear among the alternatives
when you click on a misspelled word.

My test case? "helo world" :)

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oscardelben
Safari here. Writing in this text area "its awesome" resulted in the green
image.

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thorax
Maybe because that fragment makes sense sometimes? "I marveled at its awesome
power."

If you use "Its awesome." by itself, it does catch it.

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raffi
Thanks for jumping in with that. Everything in After the Deadline uses
context. Even the suggestions spit out by "dumb rules" are run against a
contextual filter to remove suggestions that don't make sense.

For an example of what I mean, try this:

Something to conoisur when talking to a wine conoisur.

Either here on HN with the new bookmarklet or on polishmywriting.com

