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Ask HN: What do you use for spell checking?

1 points by csl ↗ HN
I've been looking for a really good open source program that not only checks for typos, but can also, to some extend, point out problems with grammar. Preferably, it would be able to understand which words to expect in different contexts.

I've tried both aspell and hunspell (which seems to be widely used) with an 11k en_US affix dictionary, but none of them seem to have _any_ problems with the following sentence (taken from Wikipedia, IIRC):

    Their coming too sea if its reel.
I mean, for reports you'd naturally spend some time proof-reading, but as I'm not a native English speaker, it's very easy for me to miss glaring mistakes besides pure typos. I'd love to use something from the command line to check my TeX-files.

What do people here at HN use?

4 comments

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I've tried out https://www.grammarly.com/, but I didn't find its suggestions helpful, and often it had no suggestions. The latter was disappointing because I know I'm not that skilled in grammar.
csl
Looks pretty neat, but the demo account is too limited. For instance, it found a problem with my other comment here, but wouldn't tell what (of course, I have to pay up 30 bucks to see what it found).

And, I guess it's web-only, which is a shame, since I wouldn't be able to automatically check my TeX-documents as part of the build process.

thaumasiotes
Can't help with the question, but I have to ask: you're not a native english speaker?? You have zero grammar problems in this post (and only one spelling error: extend for extent). Where are you from? What would you consider your primary languages, and why don't you include english? Unless you had someone write your comment for you, I wouldn't worry about this at all.
csl
Thanks for the kind comment!

I'm Norwegian, and I do consider English as one of my primary languages --- but it's not my native language, so it's easy to write something that doesn't sound right to others, not to mention grammatical problems. For instance, it's been years since I learned about punctuation and comma, and there are differences between Norwegian and English in this regard.

Writing comments online is one thing. It's entirely different when I have to write reports and stuff like that. That's when I'd like to use a good tool to help with grammar and general flow. It's easy to make a mistake when you're writing tens of pages of text that you have to deliver somewhere.