For a recent project, a client wanted a rich text editor with spell checking. This functionality exists in many popular applications, and users are accustomed to having rich-text editing capability and spell checking. We found a number of WYSIWYG editors, including openWYSIWYG, TinyMCE, and FckEditor.

We first tried openWYSIWYG with GoogieSpell. GoogieSpell worked great until we added openWYSIWYG to the text area. After a number of hours of trying everything we could think of, we looked at TinyMCE. TinyMCE had everything we needed – rich text editing and spell checking. The only problem is that the spell check didn’t seem to work with FireFox (at least the demo page didn’t correct our spelling errors). While FireFox has built-in spell checking, we needed to offer a consistent look and feel across browsers.

Next up was FckEditor. Wanting to keep it Rails, we looked for and found a plugin to help with creating the rich-text editing control. Many thanks go out to Scott Rutherford for his FCKeditor plugin. By following Scott’s directions (in the readme), we got the editor up and going, quick and easy.

Once the editor was going, we fired it up and clicked on the little “ABC” icon to check our purposefully horrible spelling. Nothing happened! Turning to the logs and the command-line, we found out that Aspell as not installed on our Macs. We fired up Fink Commander, installed Aspell and the English dictionary per this lovely blog post from Heartsome. Once that was complete and we updated the fckeditor_spell_checker.rb file (found in the lib directory of the fckeditor plugin) with the path to Aspell, we had spell checking goodness with rich-text editing. One of the cool things about the FCKeditor is that the spell check pops up in another window. Also, we tested on FF2 and IE7 with positive results.

I love Rails.

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