\jeff{krimmel}

All Things Spell Checking

The title to this post is misleading. Not only will I not be talking about all things spell checking, but I will be talking about precisely two things spell checking: the WordPress spell checker I use and a Firefox spell checking extension.

First, a few months ago I managed to somehow break my installation of the spell checker plugin for WordPress from ColdForged.org. This particular spell checker relies on a server-side Aspell installation, which worked perfectly fine for me for many months. I must have upgraded or somehow changed my Aspell installation, though, because seemingly out of the blue one day my spell checker started sending me very weird Aspell errors, and I could no longer check the spelling on my blog posts within WordPress.

I was forced to go a couple of different routes. One such route was to open a text editor on whatever computer on which I was composing the post, copy and paste the text of my post into this editor, and then run the editor’s spell check routine. Not a very elegant solution.

Fortunately, quickly thereafter I stumbled across SpellCheck.net, which turned out to be a pretty good find. In one Firefox tab, I would compose my post, and in a second tab, I would copy and paste the body of the post into SpellCheck.net’s text area and then click “SpellCheck Text”. Quite a bit simpler than the text editor option, but still more of a hassle than it had been when I could check the spelling within WordPress.

Today, though, I found two excellent solutions. One was a fix to my broken WordPress spell check plugin. After only a very little bit of digging (and yes, I was that lazy to not have done this for the past several months), I found out that the plugin was looking for a file

/usr/share/aspell/en_US.dat

that I didn’t have. But, I realized that I did have another, similar file.

/usr/share/aspell/en.dat

A quick terminal command

cp /usr/share/aspell/en.dat /usr/share/aspell/en_US.dat

solved all of my problems, and I have a working spell checking plugin in WordPress again.

The second solution is SpellBound, a spell checking extension for Firefox. Now, when I compose my blog post in Firefox, I can just right-click the text area when I’m finished writing, select “Check Spelling”, and a nice user interface pops up and walks me through my spell checking.

These two solutions beat the pants off the copy and paste routine I had to use before, either in a third-party word processor or the SpellCheck.net page. I decided to perform an extremely limited test of the two spell checkers on one word that I had misspelled for the first 18 years of my life or so: the word “indefinitely”. I would always spell it “indefinently”. Always. I don’t remember exactly when I broken the habit, but I remember feeling really pissed off that I had gone so long spelling that word incorrectly.

Anyway, I tested “indefinently” with both the Aspell-based spell checker and the SpellBound extension. SpellBound could not come up with “indefinitely” as a suggestion. I was surprised. It came up with

• indefiniteness
• indefinably
• indefinableness
• indefinitenesses
• indefinable
• indefiniteness’s
• indefinable
• undefinedness

Quite a list, but conspicuously missing “indefinitely”. Also, SpellBound has some weird interface bugs. If I resize the window, all of the red highlighting of misspelled words disappears. Also, the text will no longer scroll when the next misspelled word that is found is outside the viewing area. Those are plenty reasons enough to stick with my WordPress spell check plugin, even though because the plugin does not support WordPress 2.0, I will have to stick with 1.5.1.3 for a while longer yet.