As some of you may have noticed I make the occasional post to the HB that contains rather less than perfect spelling. And I'm not alone in this. It looks like years of working with inline spell checking has made me careless. What I propose is an addition to the clip board viewer that makes it also a spell checker. In this way you could cut and paste text from an application that does not contain spell checking (e.g. a web browser or a graphics application) and see quickly where you had gone wrong. I currently do this with the first available application that has a spell check - usually Outlook - which is far from an efficient way to check. The dictionary would also be at the OS level so you would not have to teach separate applications the same words peculiar to your every day parlance.
-- mcscotland, Jan 29 2002

AutoSpell Suite http://www.spellche...?ct=HB&dst=as-suite
Add full-featured spell checking to most Windows programs. Free demo available. [Liza8a, Oct 05 2004, last modified Oct 17 2004]

It is the application silently correcting your typo's on the fly that makes you too lazy.

Fit a 'slap me sideways arm' to your computer and program it to administer one for each mis-spelt word.

The problem will soon get eradicated. Mebbe - E--Yow!
-- neelandan, Jan 29 2002


Otay
-- thumbwax, Jan 30 2002


Putting everything into the OS is wrong. (For one, it makes for a big OS that's controlled by one company and gives you no way out when things break.)

Instead, come up with a simple architecture that lets applications share capabilities and have the spell checker participate in it, offering its services to anything that contains text.

Unix got that right 25 years ago; I don't see why it can't be reinvented.
-- jutta, Jan 31 2002


Shouldn't some sort of Java* crapplet be able to do this? Merriam-Webster has one that goes in the links in IE...you highlight a word and click the link and it goes to the website and gives you the definition of the word. So obviously it's possible to pick up words from a page and feed them to a program...
-- StarChaser, Jan 31 2002


jutta: True it is wrong. But MS have been doing it for years, so rather than get Bill and his buddies to re-code Windows round a more sensible architecture, an OS 'extension' is more probably appropriate. Windows does also have a way to let applications share services - COM.

UnaBubba: good advice. But I want the easy option.

starChaser: you could get almost any program/script to do this, web pages are just text files after all.

The problem still remains though - the text I am typing now is not easily avaliable to anything other than my Windows OS. Now I've thought about this more, Web developers could <embed> a plugin that ties into a local spelling resource (packaged with the browser), which is fired on this textarea's onChange event. Would work, I think, though it might be very slow. Hmm....Actually Unabubba's suggestion might be easier in the end.
-- mcscotland, Jan 31 2002


Now me lad, try this:

Open up Word or whatever is your favourite spell-checking editor and type your text into it, spell check, correct errors and then copy and paste into the text box, as UnaBubba always tells people and they don't listen anyway.

Now comes the interesting part: you go through it, and delete something leaving a missng letter effect, and change another letter somewhere else, with a letter nexr to it on the keyboard. Thus do you write correctly spelt, yet looking as if directly typed, posts in the HB. And now y'all know my secret, I may as well stay at 'ome.
-- neelandan, Feb 02 2002


Oh yeah?

Once it gets on the b/2 it is public domain. See ya there, if it comes to that.

Psst . . . what about an out-of-court settlement?
-- neelandan, Feb 04 2002


/usr/dict/words works on every application I've tried it on.
-- LoriZ, Feb 05 2002


Your obviously not suffering in the MS world though...
-- mcscotland, Feb 05 2002


It would certainly be possible to make a Windows spell checker which sit unobtrusively in the bottom-right corner (as UB suggested) and do a spell check of the clipboard or some such when you clicked on it. I see no reason why this couldn't be extended to spell-checking some other document on the computer (e.g. the œB form entry thingy or any other programme lacking a spell check).

[LoriZ] It doesn't work in StarOffice either.
-- cp, Feb 05 2002


/usr/dict/words isn't too large either.
-- pottedstu, Feb 05 2002



random, halfbakery