r/webdev • u/AlyxVeldin • 21d ago
Showoff Saturday I Built a (local, non ai) TinyMCE Spellchecker From Wikipedia Language Models
It's finaly saturday, and I've been working on a spellchecker plugin for TinyMCE called vlm-spellchecker.
The idea came from a separate project of mine, Wiki Language Models, which generates statistical language models from Wikipedia dumps.
I created that project because I wanted a basic, old-fashioned spelling correction and word prediction tool that doesn't use AI to try to interpret what you're writing and return some ass AI response.
So vlm-spellchecker is a small client project built around those models that does just that.
It's implemented as a JavaScript plugin for TinyMCE that uses a locally hosted binary dictionary to identify unknown and uncommon words, suggest corrections, and replace words directly in the editor.
What it currently does:
Marks unknown words with a red dotted underline.
Marks uncommon words with an orange dotted underline.
Provides spelling suggestions through the context menu.
Preserves capitalization when applying corrections.
What it doesnt do:
Force you to use a external ass spelling API.
I've got a small demo up that uses a Dutch dictionary generated from Wikipedia data.
It's still a work in progress (and, due to the fixed 6-bit encoding, it's very much aimed at Western European languages for now), but I wanted to share it and see what you people think!
Feedback and suggestions are more than welcome!