Spellbound is a nice spell checker which nicely integrates with your browser and allows for spell checking in forms.

http://spellbound.sourceforge.net/

Cheers,
Jens

http://toolbar.google.com/

With this many client side options for spelling, I'd personally rather see Atlassian implement something else than this.

Both weren't able to spell check on Confluence, either the rich text editor or the markup editor.

They do seem to work with other web forms.

Did you actually try it before commenting about those as potential solutions?

Cliff went one better and within an hour both integrated it with Confluence and wrote up the attached integration guide.

JSPell is a product (not free), but if you want to give your users spell checking this might be one good option until Atlassian implements it. JSpell and related products can enable spell checking on all your web apps.

I asked Cliff for some guidance around which licensed made the most sense for a customer of Confluence. Here is what he wrote:

"The JSpell Evolution server is licensed on a per server/domain basis. JSpell Evolution is currently in "late" Early Access release at discounted pricing and these prices are subject to change when we go 'gold' (probably about a 30% increase)... But, presently, to use JSpell Evolution on a single server you would need the JSpell Evolution Single Server License at $269.95. For a company with a single physical location and multiple servers then they would probably choose the JSpell Evolution Single Site License at $795.00. If they have multiple locations (cities) then they'd choose JSpell Evolution Global Site License at $1,695.00. These can be ordered online at http://www.thesolutioncafe.com/jspellorder.html or through a number of resellers including Software House International www.shi.com or Software Spectrum www.softwarespectrum.com."

So this is just one option.

i.e. How does one activate the manual spell check (I may not want to see all those wiggly red lines).

I'll comment again (hopefully soon) when it's up.

http://www.artemissoftware.biz/site/display/jspell/Home

What I've seen with it so far:

• Seems to work well with FireFox on WinXP and Win 2K (left click for JSpell corrections, right click for FireFox corrections)
• Seems to work well with IE on WinXP
• Does not work with my IE6 on Win 2K (I tried 2 computers) but this is probably one of many alpha version bugs/quirks or it could be something about my system.

By the way my Confluence instance is not built for speed It's a small slice of a VPS server without much memory also running JIRA. So if it's a bit slow that's why.

When you are in an Enterprise environment with a couple of thousands business users, who aren't updated with addons and firefox, and IT constraints that don't allow you to install whatever you want on your machine, spell checking provided by the server is a must.

You simply can't expect the the user to install stuff on their client machines (sometimes multiple machines) - if you could, you could use a fat client application instead of a web based application and get much better user experience.

I can tell you I keep getting requests here for this functionality and the firefox/other addons answer isn't accpetable, especially when so many web applications (including wikis) include this functionality.

My 2 cents.

I don't think this issue can be resolved at present. FireFox spell check functionality (which seems quite good) is still used by less than 30% of people. If you google 'web browser usage' you'll see that over 60% of people still use IE. As stated above this is often mandated by large corporations and there isn't necessarily another option. Or even when there is another option many of the users are non-technical and have no interest in downloading/installing anything.

If the majority of your users are technical and/or already use FireFox then I agree you're set.

The JSpell route is just one option. There has also been talk of integrating one of the open source spell checkers into Confluence (though it would have to be non-GPL) to ever be distributed by Atlassian.

The lowest level license costs around half and average developer's day of time or less so it seems like a decent solution if you want your users to have universal spell check.

• Just looking for easy solutions and quick wins

I get the point but I think that many large corporates (such as us) are
still using Internet Explorer. As Confluence is the leading commercial wiki
tool, and as a result has a large corporate community, I would expect that a
spell checker remains a high priority.

Cheers,

Sally

Here are some web-based spell checkers:

• http://orangoo.com/spell/
• http://www.iespell.com/
• http://www.spellcheck.net/

http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/CONFEXT/Word.DAV+plugin

It would be a pity that developers would have to write again the same piece of code while this is FREELY available.

If you think like an engineer you might agree with me.
If you put on the manager hat (do you remember this quote?) then you would request a spell checker.

Regards,
Octavian

P.S. In the past IE had > 90% of the market. Now is down to < 60%... (http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp)

I'm supporting the implementation and adoption of Confluence in our organization (Fortune 1000) and see spell checking as an important feature for the average end user. Our corporate standard browser installation is IE and this will likely not change. Firefox is also approved for use, and I myself use FF almost exclusively leveraging some of the plugins mentioned. But I'm not your average user.

Great discussion, but I definitely have to support the request of adding spell checking capability in the application. Maybe Atlassian could consider developing it as a feature/plugin that could be enabled or disabled depending on the preference of the business installation. Then you could please the corporate users, and those who have other freely available means of spell checking could choose not to leverage this feature.

You can't make everybody happy... but I think Atlassian does need to look at who their target is and do their best to appeal to this audience.

Thanks,

Nicholas

From another Fortune 100 company wishing to broaden Confluence's internal appeal: "Well said."

Peter

I am trying to integrate JSpell with Confluence however aren't having much luck, as the instructions above don't apply to Confluence 2.6.0 (latest version of Confluence), I'm sure the instructions work for older instances of Confluence though.

The problem I have is that the TinyMceEditor has now been made a plugin, and these instructions relate to the TinyMceEditor when was a core part of Confluence.

In my opinion (and this is only my opinion), for the corporate environment to really embrace Confluence (a great well rounded product, which is already highly successful) I think this spell checking is a key feature that needs to be implemented.

For the value it adds to the product vs implementation time, perhaps it should be re-considered as a must have for Confluence.

Roger

1. Shut down Confluence.
2. Back up your Confluence application directory, home directory and database.
3. Find the file 'atlassian-bundled-plugins.zip' in confluence/WEB-INF/classes/com/atlassian/confluence/setup/.
4. Extract this file using your favourite zip tool, such as WinZip.
5. Contained in the zip file is a jar file called atlassian-tinymce-plugin, with a particular version. Unzip this file to a new directory, again using your zip tool like WinZip. (A jar file is just a zip file which contains Java-related stuff.)
6. Apply the tinymce changes mentioned in the document above.
7. Zip up the contents of the new directory into a new atlassian-tinymce-plugin jar file.
8. In atlassian-bundled-plugins.zip, you need to replace the existing atlassian-tinymce-plugin jar file with your custom one. Do this by either zipping up the modified contents, or just modifying the existing file in place.

Please note that Atlassian didn't write these instructions, and doesn't currently provide support for integration with JSpell. Please ensure you back up Confluence before making any changes.

The reason this complexity exists is that is now possible to create plugin which includes a customised version of the Confluence rich-text editor or override the rich-text editor entirely. Some customers might wish to investigate this option for integrating a spell-checker. The first example of this new feature is a forthcoming Ephox EditLive editor plugin for Confluence which should include spell-checking. Please follow up with Ephox for more information about this, which I understand will be a commercial (i.e. paid) plugin.

Thanks for your reply. I worked out another way to get it working.
You can edit the file template\notable\wiki-textarea.vm and this seems to get the same effect, rather than unzipping, making changes, and re-zipping the jar file. I'm not sure which is the best way to do it though from a perspective of upgrading etc.

I added the 2 lines below to the function "showRichText":
// The below line was added for JSpell Evolution
setTimeout(jspellInit,500);

Please see the example below.
I hope this helps,
Roger

function showRichText(show)
{
#if ($action.useWysiwyg)
if(show)

else

#end
}

I was able to independently validate your instructions in the standalone. Although, it doesn't work with out apache-tomcat configuration yet.

I don't know if I could get a better result if I followed Matt Ryalls instructions, however I followed Roger's and thought it was OK, however I have now found that I don't get spell checking in a "News" page or in a "Comment" so it's probably back to the drawing board.

Extremely large financial services company here... we're standardized on IE, we're looking to roll Confluence out to our largest division... the pilot users have already asked about spell checking. It's a must-have feature.

(that, and, expansion of functionality in the rich text editor itself to include more "MS Word-like" options that would result in macros in wiki markup or html wrapped in html macro)

1- template\notable\wiki-textarea.vm does not exist if u are using the latest version of confluence.
2- You have to follow Matt's instructions above.
3- make sure when changing web.xml of jspell to write the correct path for lexicons folder.
4- make sure when changing editpage-form.vm to write the correct path of the .js files:
SRC="/jspellEvolution/jspellSettings.js" means that the file is under <webserver folder>/Webapps/jspellEvolution web application
3- after doing your tinymce changes make sure u shutdown confluence, then make sure to DELETE "atlassian-tinymce-plugin-2.9.jar" from the folder u set as home for confluence.
4- restart confluence, you should find the modified version of "atlassian-tinymce-plugin-2.9.jar" inside the home directory again.
5- Everything should work fine when you edit a page.
6- Please note that in order to make JSpell work when adding a New Page you should add the same script added in editpage-form.vm to createpage-form.vm (just copy and paste at the top)
7- didnt try to look for the file needed to add jspell to comments (i think comments shouldnt be checked for spelling anyways).

Hope this helps and good luck...

Sincerely yours,
Octavian

That simply isn't realistic.

I want to note to the Atlassian folks that it appears the latest version of TinyMCE ships with a spell check plugin in the distribution - it requires some small tooling to be present on the server side (GoogleSpell I think) and that might be something to look at to provide this functionality.

However, because at some large companies such as mine, some Intranet applications were actually built to take advantage of IE-only features, and end-users not in the IT community do not have permission to download software onto their PCs, spell check is still a major issue for us, as it will take a considerable amount of time to migrate from IE to Firefox across the company.

Are there really not enough large companies in this kind of environment to justify trying to provide a plug-in for Confluence that enables spell check for Pages, News and Comments?

Thanks,
Mike

My vote is to have a spell checker. Because of the large number of people we will have using this, and our security requirements before adding or installing anyting to a PC, it is not as simple as installing an IE plugin.

In your case using FireFox would probably work out well since it sounds like you're mainly looking for a solution for just yourself as opposed to your whole company.

thanks,
Brendan

I feel that this is an extremely important feature that needs to be added to Confluence.

A number of comments here mention the use of Firefox and its plug-in spell checkers being a solution, e.g. from Brendan Patterson [Atlassian] . I agree that this was a solution, but this 'feature' is now broken for the WYSIWYG editor in Confluence.
Please see CONF-15001 for details.

If you have an interest in this please vote up CONF-15001, as I think it is only a setting that needs to be set to TRUE - so easy to fix for the 30% of us that use Firefox.

Thanks

I'm currently working with Confluence 2.8.2 and our company requires that we integrate JSpell. Everything seems to be working. I am able to toggle between RT and WM modes without problems.

Not sure if anyone spotted this bug. In Rich text mode if I make any change and then click Undo, a left-click no longer brings up the pop-up box .

has anyone encountered this problem? and if so , what was the solution.

thanks

Sam