English is a foreign language to me, and I solve the problem using Vim for PerlMonks nodes and VimSpell, both integrated with some human judgment.

YMMV, but you may use a similar off-line solution (as belg4mit suggested) to deal with misspelled words before posting.

I don't like the idea of an automatic spell checker.

Checking a PM post is not a task that can be idly assigned to a spell checker. You want to spell-check your statements, but spare everything inside a <code> block. OTOH, comments and POD inside a <code> block should be checked as well. Not your ideal candidate task for a spell checker.

What then? I suggest using an off-line checker and applying some human knowledge of grammar: such combination is better than any automatic tool I have ever tried.

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Why bother using HTML forms to post messages? We could just compose the messages on our PDAs, use PhatSpell to spell check, FTP our posts to the PM server (using Net::FTP, of course), and have daily cron jobs automatically add our comments to the html pages. It's so simple, I am shocked that no one has thought of it before.

I think that this group (and all the native English speakers who simply type sloppily) could really benefit from a built in spell checker.

Even as a native speaker who considers his spelling to be impeccable (mostly because he's a pedant :)), I think that this is a good idea.

Just imagine, when submitting a question, next to the "Preview" button, there is also a "Spell Check" button. Alternatively, don't even give the users a choice. When previewing a message, automatically do the spell checking, and highlight the misspelled words.

The first half is a good idea. I don't like the "automatic" part, because it would more than likely utilise JavaScript -- and I like being able to utilise all of PM's functionality in a browser that has zero JS support, like ELinks. That and my opinion on JS ... well ... :)

Of course, you'd have to find a convenient way to skip all of those things which one commonly says on PM, like pieces of code and Jargon. I don't want to have to select "Yes, I mean TMTOWTDI" (remember, not all browsers have a mouse interface, or someone who can use said mouse) when I type TMTOWTDI.

Unless we can agree on what non-dictionary words we want added, it is going to be annoying to constantly see highlighted words that aren't actually mispelled. Having a personal "ignore" list is likely not feasible.

Instead, what others have said is just to use something else before posting. While this works and is good advice as an interim solution - I think in the long run we should be adding features of convenience. That is the reason I wrote Monastic Slush Fund. Why not use money monks contribute to make these kinds of features happen?

Update: I do not want to give the impression that I am necessarily for or against a spell checker. In addition to my rationale against it, demerphq points out it may be a significant load on the servers. My point is that we should not summarily dismiss feature requests because they are hard or because no one feels like working on them. We should consider using the monies contributed by monks to implement features that are in high demand.

...it is going to be annoying to constantly see highlighted words that aren't actually mispelled

Is it?

As for me, I got used to spellcheck my technical writings (and they are usually bilingual). Most of the time there are passages of text and passages of code there. It's very easy to spot a hilited word inside a mostly right text paragraph and to ignore hilited words inside code.

BTW, all the code on PM is marked up so it would be very easy to automatically skip it when running spellchecker.

BTW, all the code on PM is marked up so it would be very easy to automatically skip it when running spellchecker.

If I run the sentence "TheDamian writes perlish code on perlmonks", which doesn't contain any word that is extremely rare on this site, through "spell", it finds three unknown words.

This is a cutie too:

for f in /usr/local/share/perl/lib/5.8.3/pod/*.pod
do pod2text $f
done | spell | wc -l
   9154
[download]

This is even better if your browser is Firefox and you have the MozEX extension installed: no need to copypaste at all.

Makeshifts last the longest.

As a way to shave some development time, here is a least one perlish possibility.

I think it might be better to come up with a client-side solution as a way to offload the work to those who want the feature. Perhaps some CSS/JavaScript wizard can figure that out?

Finally, here is an extension for you Firefox users with multiple dictionaries and personal dictionary support.

I think a Spell Check button that would add color or other markup to unrecognized words would be a good thing, even if it didn't allow any personalized word lists.

Update: Gack! No thanks to JavaScript.

I am also in favor of a spell check. It could be done in JavaScript.

JavaScript you say? You mean, at the client side? Do you want to sent the entire dictionary each time someone hits "reply"? Oh well, I guess the bandwidth of Perlmonks is free.

Thanks for this post. I didn't realise Opera would provide spell checking in form fields just because aspell was installed. I have just looked at it now and it only seems to work in "textarea" boxes and not "text" input fields but it will keep me from copying and pasting into a google search query. :^)

Spell checking in text areas isn't enabled in all OS X browsers. Only the ones that are Cocoa based (as opposed to Carbon). Mozilla, for example, can't do the spell check trick.

And yes, that was a joke. Even a perfect spellchecker wouldn't catch everything.

So waht? It'll help to make nodes a little better.

I also think a spell check on the site is probably a bad idea. It would need JavaScript to be useful (auto correct in the form fields) and personal dictionaries would be a problem; a universal one would be constantly corrupted by users who believed they could spell. :) Safari on Mac has spell checking in form fields and I think the Mozilla family also has plugins for spelling. That said, checking isn't too hard, even the comments in code could be checked pretty easily. Here's one way...

update: added "+"s to the co+de, to make them close "better."
update 2: proof of concept code's a bit long so put it in readmores.