TinyMCE spellchecker should be disabled completely (or only active for old versions of IE)

I meant to add: this is from the perspective of an english speaker. The built in spellchecker is better since it learns words that I use across many sites and so doesn't underline my surname etc. It's possible that the situation is different in other languages.

I'd be in favour of this. Browser spell-checkers are far superior to the TinyMCE spell-checker and we are constantly running into problems with this.

A user profile setting that defaults to off for the TinyMCE spell-checker would be great. As far as I have been told, this is possible.

If you are able to provide a patch or links to your Git repository branch, please add a patch label so we will spot it.

We've enabled the browser spell-checker adding the following line into the lib/editor/tinymce/tiny_mce/XXXXX/tiny_mce_src.js file:

self.onPreInit.dispatch(self);

//ADDED - To enable browser check spelling
settings.gecko_spellcheck = true;
//************ END
if (!settings.gecko_spellcheck)
doc.body.spellcheck = false;

It works with Chrome and Firefox.

Besides, if needed:

• It's possible to disable the Spell-checker button removing the content of the editor_tinymce | spelllanguagelist parameter.
• It could be nice to add a parameter for enabling/disabling the context menu inside the tiny_mce editor (it's possible to get it removing the contextmenu in the plugins params in editor/tinymce/lib.php file).

Hi,

I've made a patch on lib/editor/tinymce/lib.php

Adding a function

    //Check if the spellchecker is supported by the browser (to disable the tinymce's)
    private function spellcheck_supported_by_browser(){
        if (check_browser_version('MSIE', 10)) {
            return true;
        }
        if (check_browser_version('Gecko', 20030516)) {
            return true;
        }
        if (check_browser_version('Safari', 412)) {
            return true;
        }
        if (check_browser_version('Chrome', 6)) {
            return true;
        }
        if (check_browser_version('Opera', 9)) {
            return true;
        }
        if (check_browser_version('Safari iOS', 534)) {
            return true;
        }
        if (check_browser_version('WebUI', 534)) {
            return true;
        }
        return false;
    }

On function get_init_params on the same file to modify the params of the editor:

//If the browser has spellcheker, disable the tinymce's
if($this->spellcheck_supported_by_browser()){
      //All but spellchecker
     $params['plugins'] = "{$xmedia}advimage,safari,table,style,layer,advhr,advlink,emotions,inlinepopups,searchreplace,paste,directionality,fullscreen,moodlenolink,{$xemoticon}{$xdragmath}nonbreaking,contextmenu,insertdatetime,save,iespell,preview,print,noneditable,visualchars,xhtmlxtras,template,pagebreak";
}

This modification worked for me but has some problems:
1) On firefox, the contextual menu of the browser (including the spellchecker) appears above the contextual menu of the tinymce. The tinymce's can be used by clicking outside the browser menu
2) On chrome, the right click only enables the tinymce menu to make browsers menu appear you have to (right)click again, but you cannot click on the text, so you cannot correct the marked word.

The function spellcheck_supported_by_browser can be modified to disable this feature on chrome.

I'd be in favour of this but without the browser sniffing as much as possible.

Note that Google Spell seems to be dead (MDL-38867), which makes this a much much bigger issue (as PSpell and PSpellShell are much less universal).

I've written up a proof-of-concept for 2.3.6+ which simply adds "None - in browser" as an option for TinyMCE spellchecking. It doesn't do any browser sniffing or anything like that. Worked in Chrome and Firefox; doesn't work in IE 8. I don't have access to newer versions of IE. Code here: https://github.com/mackensen/moodle/compare/MOODLE_23_STABLE...MDL-34674-23.

There's a fair few new admin options for TinyMCE in 2.4 and 2.5, which include turning off the spellchecker. When I do so, the squiggly red underline appears (in Firefox/Ubuntu at least), but I still can't right click as normal, I need to hold down control at the same time.

I think you might be able to disable the right-click menu via the advanced configuration settings, though obviously you lose the easy access to certain features that gives you.

As there are problems with the default Google spell checker, I'm promoting this issue (in line with the discussion from MDL-34674).

It should work again, lowering priority for now.

Hmm, I did not know about the CTRL+right click trick, where could we document it so that our users know??

This gets my complete support, bug trying to get some more +1's for it to land.

+1 from me.

This only gets my luke warm support until there is a clear solution for the right click menu.

Hmm, what if we added a plugin that injects help into the TinyMCE right-click menu? The last command would be "CTRL+right click to see browser commands and spellchecker options" and it could even pop up help...

That sounds ok to me Petr - if users right click expecting the spelling suggestions at least they would get the instructions they needed right then and there. Just needs confirming that it works in all browsers (that support spelling). Also not sure if we have to do anything about about ie9.

Except that testing this with chrome now - control right click gives you the browser menu with no spelling suggestions.

Chrome suggestions work fine for me in dev channel on OSX, maybe you need to enable "Use a web service to help resolve spelling errors" in Chrome or maybe chrome takes the suggestions form some OS component...

You might need to turn off the TinyMCE spellchecker for the browser one to become active. Do you see any red lines under misspelled words?

Ctrl-Right-Click works for me on Ubuntu Chromium.

I may be doing something wrong then - if it works then I agree with this solution. I don't like the use of a non-official google API.

My +1 for this:

• Remove the spelling plugin completely (debated keeping it as per Charles above but can't see the complexity being worth it) IFF
• We add "Use Control-RightClick to get browser menu" as an unselectable item at the bottom of the normal menu (is it possible to make it selectable and actually send a control-right-click??)

I should add that I disabled the spelling plugin and tested browser spelling (and ctrl-right-click) in Chrome, Safari and Firefox on Mac OS X, all worked fine.

Reopening for Martins comments to be addressed.

Thanks

Moving this reopened issue out from current integration. Please, re-submit it for integration once ready.

CTRL+ right click context menu hint added.

Tested this on IE9, firefox, and chrome and everything is working except for one minor thing:

The tooltip for the right click hint displays as "<em>CTRL + right click for more options</em>" in all tested browsers (needs tags escaped/stripped).

Can you please fix this?

Thanks Petr!

Moving this reopened issue out from current integration. Please, re-submit it for integration once ready.

weird, it means it worked in Safari only, thanks!

Thanks Petr,

Looks good now. Integrated to master.

Not sure if this is related, but I can't test on IE8

Webpage error details

User Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/4.0; SLCC2; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET CLR 3.0.30729; Media Center PC 6.0; .NET4.0C; .NET4.0E)
Timestamp: Wed, 17 Apr 2013 07:15:05 UTC

Message: Invalid argument.
Line: 7571
Char: 13
Code: 0
URI: http://jason.moodle.local/imaster/theme/yui_combo.php?3.9.1/build/simpleyui/simpleyui.js&3.9.1/build/loader/loader.js

Browser spell check works fine in IE10, Chrome, Safari and Firefox.

Moodle spell check works in IE9 (couldn't test IE8 due to JS errors that seem unrelated)

Blooming Marvelous! It's time for a knees up - your changes are upstream!

Thanks for making Moodle better!

Toodle pip

Removing docs_required label as this is now documented in http://docs.moodle.org/25/en/Text_editor

I don't know if a new tracker should be created or something added to this one. I'd be happy to create a new one if that's appropriate.

We're currently on 2.4+ and are testing 2.5. On 2.5, we see in the context menu the note that folks can do a CTRL + Right Click to get spell check options, but we're finding that adding CTRL isn't very intuitive for a number of students / faculty.

Is it possible to add a parameter to simply disable the tinyMCE right click menu entirely? We find that everything on the right-click menu is redundant with the toolbar above anyway. We removed manually, but a parameter might be helpful?

This works great in 2.4 if you change the version required in version.php. Is this worth releasing for 2.4 since MDL-38867 is considered a major bug and this corrects the usability of that change?