Feature request: Own definitions of recommended spelling

We typically use LanguageTool to describe fashion, textiles and shoes in an E-Commerce context. A couple of additional user-dictionary features would help us a lot:

  • The ability to flag overused words, superlatives and empty phrases. We have to describe many similar items – the defaults are not rigid enough for our particular use-case. The Ideal was feeding a Website-Root URL into Languagetool and it would suggest rules, based on the average usage-frequency throughout the Domain – but I guess this is outside the scope of LT?

  • An option to define alternative technical terms. LT does suggest the more industry-specific Elasthan instead of Elastan, which is great. It was even better, if one could define group-specific rules, to match the required tonality, which go beyond this case.
    One German language example would be using the layman word Gemisch in the sense of blended fabrics. It would help us a lot, to propose alternatives ourselves – and to also write the Nag-Message which proposes the superior term:

Geht es um die Materialzusammensetzung von Textilien? Wie wär’s mit Mischgewebe?

Indeed, there’s no feature in LanguageTool to automatically generate rules for overused words. If you run your own server (LanguageTool embedded HTTP Server | dev.languagetool.org) you can define your own rules as documented at Development Overview | dev.languagetool.org. You’d then need to configure your browser add-ons to use that server.

Thanks for your reply! Indeed, I had thought of creating such rules manually. They all were very basic and would not have to be context-sensitive (as in your bed English example) Common superlatives get highlighted, and some silly, overused phrases too. On the other hand, we would like to whitelist multi-word constructions LT doesn’t know and highlights without good reason. I have raised this request before.

My impression is that extensions of the personal library functionality which only whitelist forbidden strings and greylist questionable wording would not require running LT on our server. Still, thanks for sharing the link – currently though, we have too many other fish to fry :o)

The only automated functionality I hinted was searching for term frequency in a defined body of text (a web-domain). Is is something one can achieve (with reasonable effort), using the self-hosted version of LT?

If by greylist you mean you want LT to complain about these phrases, I don’t see how that can be done without changes on the server side.

LT has no features for that, you’d have to develop it yourself.

Thank you. Maybe my approach was a bit naive. With the User Dictionary you allow us to whitelist single words, which LT by default treats as potential errors. This whitelisting happens on per user level – for any other LT-user the same words still appear as marked as errors (which is fine).

I had assumed that the principle could easily get inverted. A user-specific list of flagged terms or phrases is indeed exactly the opposite of what you already allow us to do (with the non self hosted version of LT).

I also had assumed that it wasn’t difficult at all to extend your existing whitelist rule to multi word phrases, which would help us with Brand Names and such.

In a local version, you could whitelist word groups by adding them to ignore.txt.

Thank you Ruud – we’ll look into this, when time allows. I just wonder why such isn’t possible with the default version of LT. As soon as you add a single word to the user-dictionary an override for a rule is created. I so far don’t understand why that same override can’t apply for multiple words in succession (exact match + case-sensitive).

It is just not desingned that way.
Spelling is traditionally about single words.

Is there maybe a screencast available, which demonstrates the self-hosted version of LT? Is the touch and feel similar to the company hosted version? Would one have to use the Rule Editor / update the XML file for every new addition to the user-library? Any other advantages or limitations?

The self-hosted LT is just a server, so it has no look-and-feel. It can be used with existing add-ons by configuring them to use the self-hosted server.

What I actually meant…
Your visual editor and its simplistic GUI works well for none tech-savvy authors. If hooking up the self-hosted version gave us some additional features but meant leaving the styled GUI, this was no good solution: I don’t see our authors editing XML files. Generally, I consider good practice to publish a quick Demo / How-to, when there’s an alternative work mode available.

As it seems you are a German speaker, I can suggest my guide to install a LanguageTool server: Textkorrektur mit LanguageTool.

Thank you Jörg,
yup, indeed German speaker. This was very helpful. Your post made me postpone the self-hosting project, for now at least. As the local version needs quite a bit of memory, we can’t afford running it on our production server – we had to set up something else.

As soon as LanguageTool uses a custom Server – do users still have access to …

I would be extremely surprised, if yes.


I had a look at your website. Interesting :+1: