Proofreading software: Spell, Grammar, Style Checkers

TL;DR

The most useful so far are aspell and proselint. Both can tolerate markdown.

aspell check file/path.md
proselint file/path.md

While software can be helpful, please do not forget about good old books. A classic book on the subject is The Elements of Style by William Strunk, Jr.. TODO: republish using gitbook.

Recent finding: grammarly.

TODO: test those:

write-good file/path.md
yaspeller file/path.md

LanguageTool

LanguageTool is an Open Source proof­reading program for English, French, German, Polish, and more than 20 other languages.

Written in Java. Has plugins: LibreOffice, OpenOffice, Firefox, Chrome. Has command line version. Can be integrated into other programs. Has online version.

Possible to install with ‘homebrew’.

After The Deadline

After The Deadline is an intelligent language checking server, made to scale. Open source, available as online service and command line tool. Written in Java.

Possible to install with ‘homebrew’

Retext

retext is an extendable natural language processor with support for multiple languages. Retext provides a pluggable system for analyzing and manipulating natural language in JavaScript. Node and the browser. 100% coverage.

Rather than being a do-all library for Natural Language Processing (such as NLTK or OpenNLP), retext aims to be useful for more practical use cases (such as checking for insensitive words or decoding emoticons) instead of more academic goals (research purposes). retext is inherently modular—it uses plugins (similar to mdast for markdown) instead of providing everything out of the box (such as Natural). This makes retext a viable tool for use on the web.

Written in JavaScript. Has command line interface.

Alex

Alex Catch insensitive, inconsiderate writing. Whether your own or someone else’s writing, Alex helps you find gender favoring, polarising, race-related, religion inconsiderate, or another unequal phrasing.

Written in JavaScript.

write good

write good is naive linter for English prose for developers who can’t write good and wanna learn to do other stuff good too.

Written in JavaScript. Has command line interface.

gingerice

= https://github.com/subosito/gingerice

Typography auto-correctors

Textr

Textr is simple framework to compose text transformation functions.

Written in JavaScript. Has PostHTML plugin.

Typeset

Typeset is an HTML pre-proces­sor for web ty­pog­ra­phy. It uses no client-side JavaScript but gives you hang­ing punc­tu­a­tion, soft hy­phen in­ser­tion, op­ti­cal mar­gin out­dents, small-caps con­ver­sion and punctuation substitution.

Written in JavaScript.

eyo

eyo restoring the letter «ё» (yo) in Russian texts.

Written in JavaScript.

typograf

typograf typography checker and auto-corrector for Russian texts.

Written in JavaScript.

Typogruby

Typogruby improve your web typography with a simple Ruby gem

Truty

Truty a simple string converter, which aims to fix all the typography imperfections of the plain text.

  • https://github.com/typograf/links
  • http://practicaltypography.com/typewriter-habits.html

Online services (proprietary)

yaspeller: CLI for Yandex.Speller API

yaspeller search typos in the text, files, and websites. Use Yandex.Speller API.

Written in JavaScript. Has command line interface.

Gitbook

Gitbook editor provides proofreading functionality

Hemingway Editor

Hemingway Editor makes your writing bold and clear. Put in text and see where you can simplify your prose.

Glavred

Glavred - style checker for Russian texts. Good for advertisements, news, articles, sites, instructions, letters, and commercial offers. Bad for poetry, literature.

typograf

typograf - typography checker for Russian texts.

See also comparison of typography checkers

Publications

  • http://academicguides.waldenu.edu/writingcenter/publication
  • http://www.danielnaber.de/languagetool/download/style_and_grammar_checker.pdf
  • http://aclweb.org/anthology/W/W10/W10-0404.pdf
  • https://www.artlebedev.ru/everything/izdal/spravochnik-izdatelya-i-avtora-2014/
  • http://www.chompchomp.com/
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flesch%E2%80%93Kincaid_readability_tests

English Syntax Highlighters

  • https://english.edward.io English Syntax Highlighter
  • https://github.com/mortenjust/cleartext-mac A text editor that only allows the 1,000 most common words in English
  • http://www.mrspeaker.net/dev/syntx/
  • http://evanhahn.github.io/English-text-highlighting/
  • https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11294026
  • http://swizec.com/blog/i-wish-this-existed/swizec/4045
  • https://github.com/inderpreetsingh/Lord-Byron

Natural language processing

  • http://nlp-compromise.github.io/website/ see “Text Parsing” section
  • http://www.chrisumbel.com/article/node_js_natural_language_nlp
  • https://wit.ai/