344686 - Spell checker needs an "ignore all" command

Status: NEW

(Core :: Spelling checker, enhancement)

Description

[Maury Markowitz]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9a1) Gecko/20060714 Minefield/3.0a1
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9a1) Gecko/20060714 Minefield/3.0a1

The spell checker system includes an "Add to Dictionary" command, but there are many instances where a user would prefer to simply ignore a spelling for this particular document, or perhaps session.

I would recommend adding a "Ignore this word" selection to the right-click contextual menu.

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[Jesse Ruderman]

Doesn't right-clicking and unchecking "Spell check this field" do what you want?

Comment 2

[Brett Wilson]

I deliberately left this out to keep the context menu under control.

Comment 3

[Maury Markowitz]

I'm all for keeping menus under control, but you might want to reconsider this one. Without it my documents are literally filled with red squigglies, so many that the spell checker is rendered useless. This was my #1 reason for switching to Safari when I got my Mac (after discovering it HAD a spell checker, it's not turned on by default?!)

Comment 4

[Maury Markowitz]

Jesse: Let's say I'm writing an article on the Wikipedia about Dietrich Küchemann. I certainly want to spell check the article as a whole. However, since the name "Küchemann" appears throughout the article, the entire text is filled with red squigglies, making it all too easy to miss the real errors. Now I could add "Küchemann" to the dictionary, but in any other article typing Küchemann is almost certainly an error. Remember: larger dictionaries in spell checkers led to MORE errors, not less.

Comment 5

[Jesse Ruderman]

I think it's much more likely that you'll go back and edit the Küchemann article than that you'll accidentally type Küchemann elsewhere as a typo.

Comment 6

[Brett Wilson]

The reason I didn't think it was worth the clutter in the context menu is that web forms are very transitory, reducing the value of ignore all. When you are going to leave the page in 10 minutes, it reduces the value of ignore all, and it is more likely you either want to just ignore the underlines or add it to the dictionary. Word has this option, but there you are much more likely to come back to the same document and edit it, taking advantage of those ignored terms.

There is also the practical consideration of it being hard to implement. The spell checker object is global. We could hang added words off of the document somewhere (don't know exactly where) and filter those out of the input, but we could not suggest those added words as corrections unless it was added to the global dictionary. This limitation in the Firefox 2 spellchecker (finally fixed by using Hunspell in Firefox 3) generated a lot of complaints.

Comment 7

[:Hb]

Typically I use "Ignore All" and not "Ignore" when composing mail. "Ignore" seems obsolete.