Q: Google Spell Check
-
Jun 16, 2015 2:29 AMby Roote,OS X's spell check is a system wide service for almost all bundled and third party applications. You can read about the basics from the Apple support document OS X Yosemite: Check spelling and grammar.
As Spotlight increases in capability and becomes more integrated into the operating system with access to more structured data, including data from the Applebot web crawler, natural language search, etc., I expect improved support for grammar, homonym and context-sensitive spell checking. Until then, you can still use Google's servers, which "Ask Google For Suggestions" uses. Here is a suggested workflow:
With three finger tap look up enabled in System Preferences, and "Check Spelling While Typing" selected from Safari's menubar, as you type in a Web form for instance, the word may become underlined with a red line indicated it may be misspelled, or at least not in the LocalDictionary word list. With a three finger tap you can initiate a Quick Look preview to see if the word is in the Dictionary app or in Wikipedia.
A positive result indicates that the word is spelled correctly, but not in the LocalDictionary word list. You can add a word to LocalDictionary by a two finger tap or with a Control-click on the word. This will bring up a contextual menu where you can select "Learn Spelling" to add the word.
If the word is spelled incorrectly and not in the LocalDictionary word list, you will get a "No Result Found" message.
With a two finger tap or Control-click on the word again, a contextual menu will appear where you can select "Search with Google" (or Bing, Yahoo, or DuckDuckGo depending upon which search engine you use).
This will send the text string to the search engine's servers where it will be parsed and the indexed metadata searched to return a suggestion. A Webpage will open where you can highlight and copy the correct spelling and paste over the misspelled word in your Web form. You can then add the correctly spelled word to the LocalDictionary word list as described above.
Once the correct spelling of a word is in the LocalDictionary word list, the next time you misspell the word it will either be corrected automatically, a suggestion will pop-up which you can accept by continuing to type, or you can Control-click the word to bring up a contextual menu with the correct spelling.
If you want to add more than one word to LocalDictionary, you can open the word list in a plain text editor such as TextEdit and paste the words into it. Be aware that you will need to resort the word list into alphabetical order to maintain functionality. An OS X service tool such as DEVONtechnologies WordService, in particular Sort Words Ascending, is useful for this. The word list is located at ~/Library/Spelling/LocalDictionary.
Apart from spelling, one feature I find useful and efficient is Safari's Quick Look preview of Web links of websites and media to see if they are worth opening in tabs. In the Quick Look window websites are scrollable and media will play. Use a three finger tap to open a link. Arrange the link either at the top or bottom of a webpage before selecting it to maximize the size of the Quick Look window.
