Tuesday, August 16, 2005

Spellchecking in Firefox

Sometimes you've got to enter a lot of information in a form on a webpage, as I'm doing now to enter this post. I am one of the world's worst spellers, so it's useful to have spell-check capability available. Now Blogger has a little spell-check button above this box, but it opens a popup window, which is generally regarded as Unmitigated Evil, so I try to avoid that.

Now, however, comes a Firefox Extension known as AspellFox, which uses the aspell command along with an xterm window to do your spell-checking. The extension adds an "AspellFox" item to your context (right-click) menu, enabling you to spellcheck what you type. Since it uses aspell, it automatically uses the personal dictionary you've created on your own computer, so you don't need it to tell you how to spell Mehl or Papaconstantopoulos (look it up).

Unfortunately, it only works with aspell and xterms, so it's of little use to Windows users. Sorry about that.

When it's finished, it pops up a window saying Spellcheking done!. Hmm.

0 comments: