Spell Check Notes

mryckman

Hello,

Would it be possible to enable the firefox spell check stuff in the tinyMCE notes box?

I have no clue how hard that is to do... but it would be handy.

Mike

dstillman

http://www.zotero.org/support/1.5_beta_known_issues

I'm not actually sure why it's not showing up and haven't had the time to look into it, but we're aware of the issue. Thanks.

goatrockresearch

The notes are being spelled in the HTML (view the note in HTML0. I have not explored why this happens in the "background," but you can (if you are slightly familiar w/ HTML) use it for now to check the spelling.

DSworn

I imagine that at some point in the future this issue will be resolved and we'll start seeing spell checking as-you-type, à la Firefox. But personally I prefer being able to switch over to HTML to see my errors as it's less distracting when I'm writing quick notes. Users that frequently take notes in multiple languages or in non-standard English may also find the feature annoying.

On the other hand, I wouldn't want to have to turn off the spell check feature in Firefox just to have it disabled in my notes. Likewise, I'd prefer not to have to have to go through Zotero's preferences to turn it on and off.

The best situation, it seems to me, would be to have the option of enabling or disabling it for individual notes, maybe with a check box in the notes toolbar. Obviously it would be a good idea to have a universal enable/disable option in Preferences, too.

Thanks and sorry if this has already been covered elsewhere.

inthylight

I realize that the FF spell check does not yet work in Beta 2 (http://www.zotero.org/support/2.0_beta_known_issues).

If Zotero is open to suggestions on how to improve the spell check feature in future releases, I think it would be great to see Zotero incorporate the "After The Deadline" AI-based spell, grammar, and style checker (http://www.afterthedeadline.com) as has recently been incorporated into WordPress (http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2009/09/08/atd-wpcom/). Since ATD is free for personal use, offers an API, and provides more robust features than the built-in FF spell check, ATD would be a sweet addition to an ever-improving Zotero.

adamsmith

there might be some concern about this not being open-source.
On the up-side: It does work with TinyMCE (the app that Zotero uses for notes) out of the box:
http://www.afterthedeadline.com/download.slp?platform=TinyMCE

alexuw

Unfortunately getting a spell-checker to work in tinymce is not so easy.

The model is that the spell-checker runs on a server, accessible via http. Recall that normally tinymce is embedded in a web page, not in the browser UI as zotero is.

It could be that this difference (running in browser chrome vs. web page) is why the built-in firefox spellcheck doesn't work in zotero, even when you set the tinymce param gecko_spellcheck. A bit frustrating.

jmac62

Thanks for the tip that I can get spell checking by going to HTML view. Would be nice to have in the main note window, but this works for now.

ajlyon

there might be some concern about this not being open-source.
On the up-side: It does work with TinyMCE (the app that Zotero uses for notes) out of the box:
http://www.afterthedeadline.com/download.slp?platform=TinyMCE

It does appear to be open source. I'm more concerned about it requiring an external server (although the server code is all open source).

Agnus_Deis

You can use the spellchecker in Xinha Here!, another Firefox extension. When you are done with editing your notes in Zotero, click on "Edit in a Separate Window" button, then click on "HTML" button, then right click on the window that pops up with the HTML code inside, then go to "Xinha Here!" menu, then click on "Open Xinha in Window", then right click in the Xinha Editor window and check the "Check Spelling" checkbox. Misspelled words will become highlighted and you should be able to correct them with the Firefox spellchecker in many languages according to the dictionaries installed. Sounds inconvenient, but better than nothing and works very well.

Kubuntu Lucid 10.04
FireFox 3.6.3
Zotero 2.0.3
Xinha Here 0.17

coneill

Has the spell check issue been resolved? I just downloaded the latest version of Zotero and I cannot use spell check on my notes. This is very frustrating.

ajlyon

No, it hasn't yet been resolved.

Maybe we could switch from TinyMCE to Firefox's built-in Midas (http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=986045&start=0 ; https://developer.mozilla.org/en/midas ; http://kb.mozillazine.org/Firefox_:_Midas). That would probably address the spell-check and linking issues.

dstillman

Simon could probably provide more details, but, from what I remember, the last time we looked at Midas we determined that it was woefully insufficient for our needs.

coneill

I just decided to spell check in html mode. Clunky, but it will do.

Greg

I was excited to discover that spell checking in notes seems to (nearly) work in 2.0.9. I didn't find anything about this in the change log but misspelled words are now underlined in red! Unfortunately, I do not get any suggestions when I right-click the word but just the normal tinyMCE menu with cut, copy, paste, insert image, and alignment.
Anyone has the same experience? Without having a clue about the actual code behind all of this, this change gives me the feeling spell checking is not far away...

dstillman

Yes, that's a side effect of a change to how TinyMCE is integrated into Zotero—I've added it to the changelog. (It's a little finicky. For example, it doesn't appear when hitting Return—just space.) No estimate on when there'll be full support, though.

Gracile

Dan: that's great! But how to turn it off or activate it with another language (e.g.: French). My notes are full of red lines now.

dstillman

We'll see if we can improve this, but you'll have to do it through Firefox for now. Go to about:config in the Firefox address bar, search for 'spellcheck', and set spellchecker.dictionary to, say, 'fr-FR'.

Gracile

Perfect. I should have looked in the prefs before posting. Thanks!

iOMEDICO_HH

With Version 4.06 the spell checker in my non-English Firefox environment has gone wild :-( Although about:config says de-DE for spellchecker.directory the underlining of my German comments makes reading very difficult. Any ideas?

I just found out that when I start the HTML edit mode, everything works fine - I can even choose the spell checker et al. However, at some point I have to close the HTML edit window - and than, everything is back to - the underlining hell :-)

w_traverse

Not to mention the standalone version! Very, very nerv-racking (to put it mildly). Is there anything I can do? Thanks!