Languagetool
Version: 4.5.1 Web: https://www.languagetool.org
Languagetool is an unmatched companion for anyone who writes a lot and needs to quickly fix spelling or grammar errors. Note that this applies to both native English speakers and others, since it supports more than 25 languages. The biggest benefit to using Languagetool is that it provides both a regular spell-check and a set of rules for fixing grammar errors. Commas, articles, tenses, prepositions and a lot of other linguistic hard bits immediately get highlighted with Languagetool’s famous blue curvy line once a user commits a mistake.
Although there is a handy proofreader tool right at the project’s main web page, Languagetool has many other usage options. The most evident and easy way is to install the extension for Libreoffice or Openoffice.
There is also a standalone Java-based application and a collection of browser extensions for Chrome/chromium and Firefox.
The online proofreader can only check text snippets below 20,000 words, which is still impressive. Apparently, the Libreoffice extension has no size
limitations, but lacks support for ‘n-grams’ and is therefore limited in its grammar rules. To fix this, you’re advised to manually download the 8GB of n-gram data and attach it to the application. The
Libreoffice extension has a dedicated option for choosing the directory for n-grams, whereas command-line users should start the application with the --languagemodel parameter pointing to that directory. Using n-grams greatly improves grammar checking for English, German, French and Spanish by adding extra rules.
Despite the fact that Languagetool offers paid plans for various extras, the quality of the open source version does not suffer, so everyone can enjoy this powerful grammar review tool and improve their linguistic competence. It doesn’t end here, though; if you need to go deeper, be sure to take the neural-network version of
Languagetool (https://github.com/gulp21/ languagetool-neural-network) for a spin.