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Comment by Deukhoofd | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone know how this compares to other products in its field, such as LanguageTool and Harper? LanguageTool can be hosted locally, and Harper runs entirely as an extension, so I'm interested in how the spelling and grammar checks compare.

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+1. Also worth noting that both LanguageTool [0] and Harper [1] are FOSS.

[0] https://languagetool.org/

[1] https://writewithharper.com/

Harper is an Automattic asshole property now: https://automattic.com/2024/11/21/automattic-welcomes-harper...

I've run LanguageTool Server with the ngrams[0] for years, it is legitimately excellent with the ngrams (and mediocre without). The English-only ngrams are roughly 15 GB on disk.

Just have a Windows Scheduled Task kick off this bat file:

     SET PATH=SET PATH=C:\program files\Amazon Corretto\jdk17.0.15_6\bin\
     start javaw -cp languagetool-server.jar org.languagetool.server.HTTPServer --port 8081 --allow-origin "*" -l en-US --languageModel "C:\LanguageTool\LanguageTool-6.3\ngram"

[0] https://dev.languagetool.org/finding-errors-using-n-gram-dat...

I just tested both on the text "Look Dick. See Jane. Jane run home. I says you go home to. They eats dinner." LanguageTool does what I would expect. Harper does not. However, both whine about two spaces after a period.

Edit: Alas, Hacker News also removes the extra space after periods.

browser rendering does. You'd need white-space: pre-wrap rule to retain double spaces.

Extra space after periods is never correct with proportionally-spaced fonts, which is why all browsers remove it by default.

Two spaces after periods is a kludge invented for typewriters that had monospaced fonts and touch typing teachers need to stop teaching it in the modern era where most writing uses proportional fonts.

Curiously, it‘s also a tell-tale sign that a North-American typed the text.

Just as a space before colons or exclamation marks is a sign that someone francophone typed it.

Indeed - especially the space before colons and semi-colons. The space before exclamation marks sometimes happens in informal typing amongst Brazilians. But never the space before colons/semi-colons.

Harper will detect those errors in its next release.

We're building a Chrome extension grammar checker that runs locally using Chrome's built-in LLM.

You can try it out here:

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/grammit-the-ai-gram...

LLMs can also correct other sorts of mistakes, such as correcting "The first US President was _Ben Franklin_" to "George Washington".

>LLMs can also correct other sorts of mistakes, such as correcting "The first US President was _Ben Franklin_" to "George Washington".

And they can also cause new factual mistakes that a grammar checker never would!

Preach.

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