Spell checker
 

Are there any plans to include a spell checker? I've just run across a few files that could surely use one.

See issue # 143:
http://code.google.com/p/sigil/issue...%20Attachments

Hya, Charlie, here's a note and a wee poem we used to carry on an older version of our website as advice to authors submitting work.

ALWAYS use a spell checker before submission of your manuscript. First of all, it will lose all those ugly and worrying red and green underlines that give an editor the willies. Also it will help clean up typos and encourage you to look again at some spelling, punctuation and grammar. Don’t, though, follow the programme’s advice blindly. It’s to be considered a prompt only. You don’t want to make the kind of howlers suggested by the poem below. Good luck.

The Spell Checker

Eye halve a spelling chequer;
It came with my pea sea.
It plainly marques four my revue
Miss steaks eye can knot sea.

Eye strike a key and type a whirred
And weight four it two say
Weather eye am wrong or write.
It shows me strait a weigh.

As soon as a mist ache is maid,
It nose bee fore two long;
An dye can put the era rite.
Its rare lea ever wrong.

Eye have run this poem threw.
I'm sheer your pleased two no
Its letter perfect awl the weigh;
My chequer tolled me sew.

Cheers. Neil

:thumbsup:

A spell-checker would be great help to those of us trying to clean up epub files we already own. Not so much for spelling but for the sadly too frequent OCR errors I find in ebooks. Plus, words frequently seem to get squished together, i.e. tohim instead of to him.

So, I would love a spell-checker too, especially one that works across the entire document instead of just one chapter at a time. I'm currently using a text editor for this, but it is a lot of work, unzipping the epub, going through each piece, and then remaking the epub.

-Marcy

Try something like this for now.

There are probably others, if that doesn't work.

Hi, Cap! {Hitch waves}

Do you use this? How does it work for you? (Do you use it in Notepad++?)

Hitch

When I used to use Windows, I think I used Freespell. Years and years ago now.

I recall it working pretty nicely.

On Linux, there are a few readily available libraries/utilities (like aspell, which Freespell is based on.)

I don't use Notepad++, I use NoteTab Pro (superior in every way! :) ) which has a built-in spellchecker, amongst other things. I work in a virtual machine of Win2K, and basically only fire it up for NoteTab. I highly recommend that you switch your editor. ;)

RE: OOOPS!
 

Hey, cap:

Actually, {insert blushing emoty here}, I am using NoteTab, you turned me on to it and I love, love, love it. Still navigating my way around the clips, but it completely rocks. I simply typed Notepad++ when my brain thought Notetab. DUH.

WRT "freespell," I just tried it and it had a moderately disastrous result. I ran a spellcheck on one of my xhtml pages inside of Sigil, and when I went back to the page, the formatting had changed on the font. I tried it on a test file, so it was no big (and of course you can just exit w/o saving the unwanted change), but, still...I think I'd find something else, particularly for users who are new to Sigil, html, etc. FWIW!!

P.S. - @Valloric, is there some reason we don't have a simple "close file" option on the menu, instead of having to exit out of Sigil or open a new file???

Hitch

Good to hear. You always seemed sensible. :) I've PM'd you.

I presume you used it in the Book View? I'm not sure if it's (X)HTML aware, so if you did it in Code View... Maybe there's a preference setting for (X)HTML? Have you tried tinySpell (second link above)?

The spell checker in NoteTab Pro is (X)HTML aware, but you have to set its options (once you open the spellchecker, there's a button to set them.) I'd code there and spellcheck there before importing to Sigil.

Yeah, I was in BV. I made a spelling change using freespell--it was changing the spelling on "nee," which didn't actually need it, it was italicized--and voila! the entire page changed to h2 text. I have no idea why, the nearest h2 tag was several paragraphs away. I didn't bother spending a lot of time investigating it; I'd rather just CTRL-A, CTRL-C and CTRL-V the pages into NoteTab and spell-check it there. It's only a few keystrokes and it's safer than screwing around with the actual code in Sigil if it goes wonky.

Haven't tried tinyspell yet. I'll report back, for those in need of a spellchecker. I, too, have to look out for OCR errors, so I understand the desire for one.

Hitch

Sigil (like Word) uses the Single Document Interface system, and thus doesn't have "Close File". That's something for Multiple Document Interface applications.

I prefer SDI for applications like Sigil. Using MDI for a word processor would violate the Law of Least Astonishment, since Word, OpenOffice Writer, AbiWord etc. are all SDI.

I'm a big fan of Occam's Razor myself, but--still feels hinky when I have to exit Sigil just to "close" a file. Gives me heebie-jeebies. Makes me feel like there are bits and bytes out there, floating around in my ram that know not whither they should be.

Besides, when you're astonished as often as I am--the Law of Unintended Consquences operating full-time around here when I'm making ebooks--one more astonishment probably would go unnoticed, hence rendering "astonishment" into something ELSE altogether, by definition.

Okay, babbling now, I'm going.

Hitch

File "New"
works :)

Same thing I was going to suggest. In fact, renaming that function to "New/Close" would be a simple change, and since it effectively serves the same purpose, doing so might eliminate further confusion on this front.

Of course, then you would get people asking why you haven't mapped the function to Ctrl+W (which, as near as I can tell, doesn't have any current mapping in Sigil...).

Perhaps you could duplicate the functionality of New (Ctrl+N) as Close (Ctrl+W)... since "Word, OpenOffice Writer, AbiWord etc." do all have the ability to exit/wipe the current document with a Crtl+W combination?

- M.