Give HN: Proofreading Bookmarklet that Works Here

-- R

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.

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.

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