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Give HN: Proofreading Bookmarklet that Works Here
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- NikkiA 17y agoSeems 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.
- raffi 17y agoCould 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.
- raffi 17y agoI believe the Chrome issue is a conflict with Chrome's popup blocker or same-source policy. I created a page with nothing but a textarea and put it on the same host where the request with your text goes. It works there in Chrome. I then put the same page on another host and I get the "no writing errors found" response. If it's a security policy or popup blocker, that may explain why I'm not seeing any errors from the browser. It looks like I'm not going to be able to fix this for Chrome without some serious work arounds.
- oscardelben 17y agoSafari here. Writing in this text area "its awesome" resulted in the green image.
- thorax 17y agoMaybe because that fragment makes sense sometimes? "I marveled at its awesome power." If you use "Its awesome." by itself, it does catch it.
- raffi 17y agoThanks 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
- oscardelben 17y agoI used that because I've seen it as an example.
- RyanMcGreal 17y agoI'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.
- nkurz 17y agoMorning cold fingers. A quality comment that I meant to vote up and missed. Sorry.
- raffi 17y agoHi 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
- RyanMcGreal 17y agoHi 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.
- raffi 17y agoThanks. 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. :)
- RyanMcGreal 17y agoGlad to help! Thanks for being so attentive to feedback and timely in responding.
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- mmelin 17y agoSeems to work well here. But I don't see how it didn't suggest "hello" as a possible correction of "helo"?
- raffi 17y agoYou 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.
- mmelin 17y agoThanks 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" :)