Wednesday, July 08, 2009

Blogger's spellcheck

You've probably already realised that this is a Blogger blog. It's no big deal - it was the easiest to set up when I ventured into the world of blogging, and I've never really had any reason to change. I might switch at some point when I figure out how to put my website and my blog into the same space. Hopefully that will be after I've figured out how to customise the design, since I'm not really happy with the look of either of them, and none of the templated alternatives do the trick for me.

But I digress...

Just lately, Blogger's spellcheck appears to have taken leave of its senses. When you run a spell check before publishing, any unrecognised words are highlighted by means of yellow shading. Clicking on a shaded word generates a list of possible alternatives. Rather like Word, except you use the left mouse button, rather than the right to view the suggestions.

Lately, words are being highlighted that are perfectly fine. The list of alternatives usually starts with a duplicate of the highlighted word. At first I thought I was seeing things - you know how we have a tendency to read what we meant to type, rather than what we did type? But this has been going on for a few days now, and it genuinely is suggesting exactly the word I have typed, spelt exactly as I have spelt it. This time around, the spellcheck has taken to the word alternatives, which it suggests I spell alternatives.

Sigh.

Anyone else having a similar experience?

4 comments:

Stephen Downes said...

If you use Firefox, it handles spell-check for you, with a dictionary that *you* can manage.

rlubensky said...

I've stayed on "old" Blogger, so don't have a spell check facility as far as I can see. But I work in Firefox, which provides a spell checker for any online textarea. So can you turn off Blogger's and enable Firefox's?

rlubensky said...

Let me correct myself, I use the old templates rather than the new layout formatting method. But that's irrelevant, sorry. What is perhaps different for me is that I don't use the Blogger wysiwyg editor (I tend to handcraft html), nor its spellcheck button. But Firefox underlines misspelled words for me. It's doing it now as I tyype this comment :-)

The upsycho said...

Hmm. Thanks for the input. Now to figure out how to get Firefox - which, yes, I *do* use - doesn't everybody? ;o) - to do my spellcheck for me instead of Blogger. *Such* a technical numpty!