Feedback on GoogieSpellContrib for TWiki

GoogieSpell tested on twiki 4.0.4 aspell not needed.

See the attachment

• Twiki_readme.txt: Twiki_readme.txt

-- SteveStark - 23 Oct 2006

Thanks Steve for contributing this! How about packaging this as a GoogieSpellContrib, containing the documentation topic data/TWiki/GoogieSpellContrib.txt and attachments pub/TWiki/GoogieSpellContrib/*.js etc (all files needed as TWiki file attachments)? See ContribPackageHowTo.

-- PeterThoeny - 23 Oct 2006

I have just attached an improved how-to. Pictures are now displayed beside the ‘Check Spelling’ link to be seen at bottom-right of an edit box.

Thank you, Peter, for having me here. The Twiki project is fantastic. I view Twiki as easy for the beginner. Yet can be extremely complicated at the advanced. I will study to implement the package, as I am motivated to help in this powerful twiki project.

-- SteveStark - 23 Oct 2006

I changed my suggestion above from add-on to contrib.

-- PeterThoeny - 23 Oct 2006

I attached googiespell_send_request.zip, the proxy script that calls the Google spellchecker. I suggest to package this as bin/googiespell_send_request.pl into GoogieSpellContrib.zip, and fix the documentation to point to that script. (Better to use a descriptive filename so that it is obvious where this script comes from.)

-- PeterThoeny - 23 Oct 2006

BTW, instead of links like "http://NOSPAM.com/pub/TWiki/Googiespell/" you can use "/pub/TWiki/Googiespell/" to make it more portable.

You could create a new googiespell skin, actually just a subset that overloads a few template definitions, and activate this with a Set SKIN = googiespell,pattern setting in TWiki.TWikiPreferences. That has the advantage that you can create a package that can simply be installed with a copy, e.g. no editing of existing files is needed. This is preferred so that a later TWiki upgrade can be done more easily.

-- PeterThoeny - 23 Oct 2006

I have a concern regarding spell checking that relies on a server out on the Internet. Even though the policies say they are not caching the text that is spell checked, my information security folks have a problem with us using any tool that sends data to a remote server. Especially which the information could contain sensitive information. I would rather see a method based on aspell that could be install on the TWiki server itself.

-- RickMach - 23 Oct 2006

That is a very valid concern. I would not recommend to install a web services based speller behind corporate firewall. For public projects it is an easy way to get spell checking. A note should be added accordingly to this contrib.

-- PeterThoeny - 23 Oct 2006

There are spellchecker plugins for twiki that use the aspell but no alternatives until now. This spellchecker is useful for a hosted site that cannot access the aspell. Regardless of a spellchecker, sensible data should not be written into a public html and I will make a note of this.

-- SteveStark - 23 Oct 2006

Where can I find information about Set SKIN = googiespell,pattern? Also, does Twiki have a text list of all the core variables such as %date% with their descriptions?

-- SteveStark - 23 Oct 2006

See TWikiSkins and TWikiVariables. Ask a Support question or drop by in TWikiIRC if you have specific questions.

-- PeterThoeny - 23 Oct 2006

I will try to package it soon

-- SteveStark - 24 Oct 2006

Rick,

In our internal TWiki we have the same concern about sending our content to Google to get spell checked. So, I implemented an "aspell" shim, which handles the same XML request as google, and translates the output into the same Google format. This makes the GoogieSpell package work fine with the standard edit. And, it provides the opportunity of including specialized dictionaries.

-- CraigMeyer - 24 Oct 2006

After reading SpellCheckerPluginDev, I will incorporate some of those ideas.

• strip HTML - done
• Ignore WikiWords - good idea
• Ignore TWiki markup - (ex. remove %MAKETEXT{}% etc.)
• Explore adding spell check into CommentPlugin

-- CraigMeyer - 25 Oct 2006

ok, i plan to package it and have it ready hopefully by late tomorrow

-- SteveStark - 30 Oct 2006

GoogieSpellAddon package is now available

-- SteveStark - 30 Oct 2006

Thanks Steve for packaging GoogieSpell. Some suggestions:

• Better to package as Contrib, not Add-on (I renamed the topic and attachment)
• Add a GoogieSpellContrib topic to the package (I created a GoogieSpellContrib topic; it needs to be completed; add also a note on security)
• Put all attachments under pub/TWiki/GoogieSpellContrib/
• Do not put Perl executables in the pub tree (execution is typically turned of for security reasons); package it under bin (and rename to something like bin/googiespell_send_request.pl to make it obvious where it belongs to; I have updated the doc accordingly; I attached googiespell_send_request.zip to this topic)
• Consider packaging the template as template/edit.googiespell.tmpl, with instructions on how to activate it (to make upgrade easier)
• Update the package form in GoogieSpellContrib as needed.

-- PeterThoeny - 30 Oct 2006

Your welcome peter, and I will make the changes.

-- SteveStark - 31 Oct 2006

I am attaching my version of "send_aspell", which allows GoogieSpell to use the unix aspell instead of Google for those concerned with sending text outside their intranet. This can also be extended with local dictionaries for domain specific needs.

-- CraigMeyer - 31 Oct 2006

I just downloaded and installed from the ContribPackage and it seems like the description matches Peter's recomendation above, but the contents of the zip file do not. When I try to use it I get a HTTP 500 error.

-- DanielHughes - 04 Nov 2006

I still need to update the zip file but that package was tested and working. Let me know if anyone can solve this error so that I can then continue updating this package. Is this spell checker working for anybody? I believe that maybe host has disabled something so that this type of script does not work for you.

-- SteveStark - 08 Nov 2006

There is now a GoogieSpellPlugin with similar (same?) functionality. Possibly merge?

-- PeterThoeny - 09 Nov 2006

Two issues:

• The backend script in the zip file is in the pub directory tree, not bin.
• Please update the backend script with the one I contributed to the GoogieSpell site itself several months ago (It can be found here: http://orangoo.com/labs/GoogieSpell/Documentation/). The current included version appears to be one I linked in SpellCheckerPluginDev which has rather a lot of cruft from the script it was built off (also available from the GoogieSpell site).

-- StephenGordon - 09 Nov 2006

A new package is available at the GoogieSpellContrib

-- SteveStark - 10 Nov 2006

I think it would be a good idea to include both the aspell and google binary scripts for spell checking. Administrators could then use a plugin setting to switch between them. Thoughts?

-- StephenGordon - 15 Nov 2006

If you desire to... It would be nice if googlespell would be the default; My idea was to provide this plugin as an alternative to aspell because of possible host aspell limitations.

-- SteveStark - 29 Nov 2006

My point was more that everything needed for the plugin to work should be in one self-contained archive, be it with support foor aspell, googlespell or both.

Currently the package itself contains niether.

-- StephenGordon - 10 Jan 2007

Any chance of modifying this or the Plugin package to work on 4.1.x ?

-- BillBaldwin - 10 Sep 2007

I was able to get GoogieSpellContrib to work on 4.1.2 after many headaches and tracing through the implementation. I implemented with the aspell shim, but there is alot of documentation missing on little gotchas for updating paths to perl and aspell in the googiespell_send_request.pl. I also noticed that many of the files in the Contrib package have the little nuissance ^M, so you have to either run dos2unix or sed -i "s/\r//g" . After all of this, I still was not able to get the package working. So, I tried downloading the latest javascripts from the Orangoo source and replacing the content provided by the GoogieSpellContrib .zip archive. FYI: I found Firefox + Firebug pretty helpful in stepping through the problems.

-- BryanEllsaesser - 09 Nov 2007

Will you upload your working version Bryan?

-- FranzJosefGigler - 11 Nov 2007

Sorry, I haven't come back to this thread in a while. Since I had posted this, I have gone onto TinyMCE and TWiki 4.2 for my user community. GoogieSpell will not work with that combination as TinyMCE is not a text field as is with the rawedit setup. I've thought about going back and re-evaluating googiespell for raweditor in 4.2, if I ever have time. I'm about the only user for my site that likes working in the raweditor vs. the WYSIWYG editor. So, maybe I'll figure it out someday when I have the time since I am such a bad speller.

FYI: There is a similar aspell/google SpellChecker plugin for use with TinyMCE as a plugin to TinyMCE, not TWiki. I've gotten it to work, unfortunately, it involves configuration of PHP for your Web Server. I have referenced it before at TinyMCEPluginAddsTrailingSpace.

-- BryanEllsaesser - 10 Feb 2008