395327 - Mozilla should have a grammar checker.

Status: NEW

(Core :: Spelling checker, enhancement)

Description

[Justin Dolske [:Dolske]]

Seth was talking about the horrible grammar he used in a comment to a recent bug, which made me realize that I too have been guilty of such heinous acts... Having spellchecking makes it easy to glance at a block of text, and skip proof-reading ("Hey, at least the words are spelled right!"). It would be very nice to have a grammar checker to look for language abuses that a spellchecker can't catch.

I don't know what's available in the open source world, but Colin says that Leopard 10.5 (OS X) will include a grammar checker.

Comment 1

[Reed Loden [:reed]]

Check out:
* http://alanhorkan.livejournal.com/16062.html
* http://lingucomponent.openoffice.org/grammar.html

Comment 2

[(not reading, please use [e-mail] instead)]

lord knows I need it.

looking at the top ten grammatical mistakes (thanks google), just give me
something that tells me when I do:

1. Loose for lose
2. It's for its (or god forbid, its')
3. They're for their for there
4. Effect for affect
5. You're for your
6. Then for than
7. let's for lets
8. to for two for too
9. double words ("the the")

Comment 3

[Karsten Düsterloh]

English surely needs a spelling reform!
(/me hides, ducks, runs, etc. pp.)

Comment 4

[Matt Caywood]

Making this the grammar checker bug so I can dupe/mark dependencies.

Comment 6

[Matt Caywood]

The best candidate for this is almost certainly LanguageTool, which OpenOffice uses for simple rule-based grammar checking.

Comment 8

[klonos]

just adding the URLs for the LanguageTool used in OpenOffice I mention in bug 484882 (for future reference):

I thing we should support this one (OpenOffice.org uses it). There is an API
for it:

http://www.languagetool.org/usage/
http://www.languagetool.org/development/api/

+vote for this one.

Comment 9

[Andrea Monni]

There's a topic about this on GetSatisfaction, this is the URL:

http://getsatisfaction.com/mozilla_messaging/topics/is_there_a_way_to_automatically_check_grammar_in_writing_an_email

Comment 10

[Daniel Naber]

Hi, I'm the developer of LanguageTool. It's probably fair to say that there should be an *interface* to a grammar checker, not a grammar checker in Mozilla products.

For Firefox, there's now a LanguageTool plugin at https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/languagetoolfx/ but it's not as closely integrated as it could be if there was better support from Firefox.

Comment 11

[(no longer active)]

(In reply to comment #10)
> Hi, I'm the developer of LanguageTool. It's probably fair to say that there
> should be an *interface* to a grammar checker, not a grammar checker in Mozilla
> products.
> 
> For Firefox, there's now a LanguageTool plugin at
> https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/languagetoolfx/ but it's not as
> closely integrated as it could be if there was better support from Firefox.

Interesting!  Is the source code for this extension available somewhere under an open source license?

Comment 12

[Daniel Naber]

(In reply to :Ehsan Akhgari from comment #11)

> Interesting!  Is the source code for this extension available somewhere
> under an open source license?

Yes, please see
https://languagetool.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/languagetool/trunk/extension/

Comment 13

[(no longer active)]

(In reply to comment #12)
> (In reply to :Ehsan Akhgari from comment #11)
> 
> > Interesting!  Is the source code for this extension available somewhere
> > under an open source license?
> 
> Yes, please see
> https://languagetool.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/languagetool/trunk/extension/

Thanks a lot!  I was interested to see how this extension integrates with Gecko in the hopes of seeing if there is an easy way to integrate its platform pieces inside gecko, but unfortunately it seems like it just works at a very high level and doesn't have any deep integration with Gecko, which means that we probably would not be able to benefit from the work done there directly.  :(

Comment 14

[Daniel Naber]

Just to explain my initial comment (#10) a bit: grammar checkers can be quite heavyweight (well, LanguageTool is), so what would be great to have is an interface "mozIGrammarCheckingEngine" similar to mozISpellCheckingEngine. It wouldn't check single words but a complete text, and it wouldn't just return a boolean (correct or not) but a list of errors, each with from/to positions, description of the error, and a potential correction.

Comment 15

[(no longer active)]

(In reply to comment #14)
> Just to explain my initial comment (#10) a bit: grammar checkers can be quite
> heavyweight (well, LanguageTool is), so what would be great to have is an
> interface "mozIGrammarCheckingEngine" similar to mozISpellCheckingEngine. It
> wouldn't check single words but a complete text, and it wouldn't just return a
> boolean (correct or not) but a list of errors, each with from/to positions,
> description of the error, and a potential correction.

Yeah, I was actually looking for something like that implemented in the extension...

Comment 16

[Daniel Naber]

As there's now a bounty for this on bountysource.com I'd like to clarify what's my understanding of this bug, as the title is a bit misleading (but funny): it's about the integration of a grammar checker *interface*, not about the grammar checker logic itself. This means that it would be possible to implement an extension that does the actual grammar checking. Also, I'm not sure if "core" makes sense here, I'm not familiar with Mozilla code, but I'm looking for a grammar checker interface in *Firefox*. If that code would also be useful for Thunderbird, that's nice.

Comment 17

[Justin Dolske [:Dolske]]

The intent of this bug is pretty broad -- making it possible to do grammar checking in Firefox. I think the specifics depend on someone actually picking up this work and investigating how to do it. Maybe it's something bundled with Firefox, maybe it's integration with a OS-provided library, maybe it's a 3rd-party addon.

"Just an API" may be a fine way to experiment; but I think we'd want to make sure that it's useful, lightweight, and not a ongoing burden for Gecko to support.

Comment 18

[Daniel Naber]

I've added a new issue as bug 1140402 which is more specific.