OpenOffice.org Grammar Checkers
OpenOffice.org 3.2.1 was released a few weeks ago. To commemorate this, I’d like to write about the different proofreading tools available for this platform. It’s a common misconception that OpenOffice.org checks grammar out of the box. It doesn’t. OpenOffice.org does, however, have an API that lets developers add a grammar checker via an extension.
There are proofreading tools / grammar checkers for OpenOffice.org. A few that you may want to look at include:
Language Tool
Language Tool is a rule-based grammar checker with an impressive community developing rules for 18 languages. The inner-workings of this system were a heavy inspiration to AtD’s grammar checker implementation. We use Language Tool to check grammar for our French and German offerings of After the Deadline.
Readability Report
I saw Neil Newbold of the University of Surrey, the scientist developer of Readability Report, speak recently. I felt like I was listening to my proofreading brother from another mother. After the Deadline started life as a style checker hosted at PolishMyWriting.com. The AtD style checker uses best practices and suggestions from the Plain English movement to help you clean up your writing. Readability Report does the same thing for OpenOffice.org. It’s a style checker (rooted in Plain English) AND it’s a readability checker.
Some of the readability heuristics are incredible. Neil does some neat NLP work to decide which sentence is your simplest sentence and which sentences are your weirdest sentences. If you want to learn more about how these work, I recommend reading Neil’s paper The Linguistics of Readability: The Next Step for Word Processing that was presented at the NAACL Computational Linguistics and Writing Workshop in Los Angeles, CA.
Coming Soon: After the Deadline for OpenOffice.org
Since you’re here, I presume you know about After the Deadline. It’s a proofreading software service. After the Deadline uses statistical language models to offer smarter grammar and style recommendations. It also uses the same language models to detect over 1,500 misused words. If you write weather when you mean whether, After the Deadline can help you.
Recently, I started developing an After the Deadline extension for OpenOffice.org. I was so excited when I started this, I couldn’t stop until I had a beta ready for you to try (yes, you can download and install it now). It’s really cool to use After the Deadline in a word processor, like OpenOffice.org Writer.
Because After the Deadline is a software service, this extension requires an internet connection to check your grammar, style, and misused words. If you’re not connected, it will silently do nothing. Rest assured, we’re not keeping your data and this extension communicates with our service over SSL.
The code is available in a public subversion repository and there is a category in the AtD ticket tracker for this OpenOffice.org extension.
Where I’d like to see AtD go…
I often get emails from folks asking for support for different platforms. I love to help folks and I’m very interested in solving a problem. I don’t have the expertise in all the platforms folks want AtD to support. Since it’s my occupation, I plan to keep improving AtD as a service, but here is my wish list of places where I’d like to see AtD wind up:
Wikipedia
I’d like to meet Jimmy Wales, one of the founders of Wikipedia. First because I love Wikipedia and it tickles me pink that so much knowledge is available at my finger tips. I’m from the last generation to grow up with hard bound encyclopedias in my home.
Second, because I’d love to explore how After the Deadline could help Wikipedia. AtD could help raise the quality of writing there.
Since the service will be open source there won’t be an IP cost necessarily. The only barriers are AtD support in the MediaWiki software and server side costs. Fortunately I’ve learned a lot about scaling AtD from working with WordPress.com and given a number of edits/hour and server specs, I could come up with a good guess about how much horsepower is really needed.
I’d love to write the MediaWiki plugin myself but unfortunately I’m so caught up trying to improve the core AtD product that this is beyond my own scope. If anyone chooses to pick this project up, let me know, I’ll help in any way I can.
Online Office Suites and Content Management Systems
There are a lot of people cutting and pasting from Word to their content management systems. There are many web applications either taking over the word processor completely or for niche tasks. For this shift to really happen these providers need to offer proofreading tools that match what the user would get in their word processor. None of us are supposed to depend on automated tools but a lot of us do.
Abiword, KWord, OpenOffice, and Scribus
It’s a tough sell to say a technology like AtD belongs in a desktop word processor. I say this because AtD consumes boatloads of memory. I could adopt it to keep limited amounts of data in memory and swap necessary stuff from the disk. If there isn’t a form of AtD suitable for plugging into these applications, I hope someone clones the project and adapts it to these projects. If someone chooses to port AtD to C, let me know, I’ll probably give a little on my own time and will gladly answer questions.
After the Deadline 
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