Test the new LanguageTool add-on for Google Docs

Hi,

I have created a LanguageTool add-on for Google Documents. It has been published and it’s available on the Chrome Web Store.

Try it and let me know what can be improved. Please, report any bugs you find.

There are still some things to do: support for long documents and internationalization.

The code is here.

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Great work Jaume!

I’ve given it a quick test on one of my documents, and it’s far better than the other checkers available, which end up messing up the document!

I only see two minor problems:

  1. I’m unable to correct repeated whitespace (‘Possible typo: you repeated a whitespace’) - maybe this rule should be disabled?

  2. Setting the properties (en-GB in my test) doesn’t actually save the setting, and the check reverts back to en-US. The English variants, along with the Portuguese are available as document language settings, although I can’t see a way of accessing that from the add-on.

It appears to remain on en-GB between documents now, although I did originally change it whilst the sidebar was open. I think you can currently ignore the issue as non-reproducable.

Thanks, Curon.

I will take a look at the repeated whitespace rule.

The “language variety” in the Options dialog is only used when the language in the sidebar is “auto-detect”. Currently there is no “default language” setting. It is always “auto-detect”. On the Chrome extension is done the same way.

Works nicely on a first test! Some ideas:

  • What about checking only the selected text?
  • “Error: Cannot connect to server” - it would be helpful if this error message contained the URL of the server
  • “Text checked remotely by languagetool.org” - the link on “languagetool.org” is wrong
  • When I ignore an error, it comes back with the next time I check

For short documents it would be a bit annoying. For long documents it is a possible good solution. We could make it conditional on the length of the text. If the text has more than x characters, check only the selected text. Otherwise, check the whole text.

The link is https://languagetool.org/api/v2/languages. Just for testing that the server is working. What do you expect here?

I thought this was not much needed, because the text is not checked every time after a suggestion is applied. I will look into how it is done in the Chrome extension.

Now there is a button for closing a rule match (“Ignore”), and another one for closing repeated spelling errors (“Ignore all”).

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I would have expected a link to the homepage, just like in the Firefox/Chrome add-on. The average user will probably not understand that getting back JSON syntax means “the server is working fine”.

BTW, can the check be triggered by a short cut?

Good point. Unfortunately it will work only when the sidebar is active (focused).

I need some time to check mi text files stored in docs.google.com but many thanks Jaume. Its amazing to see the few errors that the google’s corrector can find compared with the errors that the rules created for you detects.

What about showing the progress icon (e.g. https://raw.githubusercontent.com/languagetool-org/languagetool-browser-addon/master/webextension/images/throbber_28.gif) instead of just the text Checking...?

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Works very nice if you select the language. But I couldn’t make language detection run (time out every time) at all yet.

Also, sometimes it reacts sluggishly.

But overall, I think this is really nice!!! Thanks!

If it does, could you check the same text on languagetool.org? Then we can see if it’s actually the LT server that is slow. It shouldn’t be - if it is, please let me know the exact time it happened.

I’m pretty sure it’s not LanguageTool as the Add-on doesn’t display its options quickly. ‘Check Text’ button wasn’t shown at all for a loooong time (had to try again to see it), so I don’t think the Add-on was connected with our server yet.

The add-on is partly client-side (user browser) and partly server-side (Google servers), so any delay in the network can affect performance.

The access to the LT API is now in the server-side. I guess it could work also in the client-side (and then it would allow the use of a local LT server). But I doubt things will improve significantly this way.

Are you able to reproduce the problem?

I am implementing a personal dictionary and an “ignore rule” feature.

There are a lot of possibilities here (the add-on can store user properties and document properties). When a user decides to “ignore” a rule or a word, it can be “just this time”, “just in this document”, “always in any of my documents” (multiplied by the number of languages, if you want to customize it further).

I would like to keep it simple, because if we offer all the possibilites the interface will become a bit cluttered. What do you think are the most useful options?

The browser add-on disables rules globally (for the current language) and adds words to the user’s dictionary. But the rules actually still run, which allows us to show the rules that would have matched at the bottom, including the number of matches:

Clicking on that information re-activates the rules. I think this approach would be nice for the Google Docs add-on, too. It makes the add-on configurable without the user ever visiting the configuration dialog.

I have published a new version (number 4). It solves most of the issues that have come out here, including a personal dictionary and disabling rules. They work as suggested by Daniel. The personal dictionary is stored in the user properties and the disabled rules are stored in the document properties.

The dictionary doesn’t work for me yet:

  • When I open the options, the dictionary area contains the word undefined
  • When I add a word (my surname) to the dictionary, the error disappears but re-appears with the next check. Also, the option’s dictionary still shows undefined.

Disabling and re-enabling rules works fine.

Thanks. It should be fixed now. I think the problem affects only users who installed a previous version of the add-on.

Yes, it’s working great now, thanks.