Find and fix spelling mistakes in page text, alternative text, labels and placeholders, on one page or on all open pages, and keep product names in a project or global dictionary.
Spell Check finds possible spelling mistakes in your pages and lets you fix them without leaving Pinegrow. It checks the text visitors read and the text that is easy to miss, such as image alternative text, ARIA labels and form placeholders. You can check a selected element, the current page or all open pages.
Spell Check is new in Pinegrow 10 and is available in Pinegrow Desktop and Pinegrow Online. Checking runs locally with the selected dictionary, so page text is not sent to a spell-check service. English is included. German, Italian and Spanish dictionaries are downloaded when you first use them.
Open Spell Check
Open a page and choose Page › Spell check page…. The Spell Check window opens and checks the page right away.
You can also start a check:
- For one element: right-click an element on the page and choose Spell check › Check selected element….
- From the command palette: run Spell check page or Spell check selected element.
- In Content Workspace: click the Spell Check icon in the panel bar.
Check a page
The top of the Spell Check window has the check controls:
- Scope menu: choose Page, Selected element or Open pages. Changing the scope runs the check again.
- Check: runs the check again.
- Fix with AI: asks AI Assistant to fix the listed issues. See Fix issues with AI below.
- Language settings (the button on the right): choose the spelling language.
Below the controls, a status line shows the language used and how many possible issues were found, for example 6 possible spelling issues in 5 elements. Issues are grouped by element. An issue found in an attribute shows the attribute name, such as @alt or @aria-label.
What is checked
- Text content, including the page title.
- The
alt,title,placeholder,aria-label,aria-description,aria-placeholder,aria-roledescriptionandaria-valuetextattributes. - The caption of
inputbuttons (thevalueof button, submit and reset inputs). - The meta description and keywords, and social title and description meta tags.
Spell Check skips script, style, code, pre, kbd, samp, var, svg and math elements, and any element with spellcheck="false". It also skips words that look like code, such as words with digits or underscores, short all-caps abbreviations, URLs, email addresses and file paths.
Fix issues
Click an issue in the list to select its element on the page. If the issue is on another open page, Pinegrow switches to that page. Up to three suggestions appear as buttons under the word. Click a suggestion to replace the word.
The correction changes the page's HTML, in the text or attribute where the word was found, and Spell Check runs again. You can undo it like any other edit. If the page changed after the check, you see The text no longer matches. Run spell check again. Click Check.
While the Spell Check window is open, issues are also underlined on the page. Right-click an underlined word and choose the correct spelling from the Spelling: "word" submenu.
When you edit the page while the window is open, Spell Check runs again automatically. An issue marked Locked is in content that Pinegrow does not let you change in the current context, so Spell Check cannot correct it.
Ignore words and use dictionaries
Brand names and technical terms are often flagged. Click the … button next to an issue, or use the Spelling submenu on the page:
- Ignore "word" hides the word until you close Pinegrow. It is not saved.
- Add to project dictionary accepts the word on every page of the current project and saves it in the project's
_pginfo/spellcheck.jsonfile. It is shown only when a project is open. - Add globally accepts the word in all your projects. It is saved in your Pinegrow settings.
Dictionary words are stored per language. A word you add while checking English is accepted only in English text.
Check all open pages
Choose Open pages in the scope menu to check every page that is open in Pinegrow. Pages that are not open are not checked. Each element group shows the page it is on.
One check covers up to 50 pages. If a check reaches its limits, the status shows result limit reached; reduce the scope. Check a single page or a selected element instead.
Fix issues with AI
Fix with AI sends the list of issues in the Spell Check window to AI Assistant as a Fix spelling task. Each issue includes the page, the element, the misspelled word, the suggestions and a few surrounding words. AI Assistant is asked to change only those words and to keep the rest of the page as it is. When the task is done, Spell Check runs again.
- AI Assistant must be enabled. Otherwise you see Pine Cone AI is not enabled.
- All issues must be on one page. Otherwise you see Fix with AI works on one page at a time. Choose Page scope and run the check again.
- To fix only some issues, check a selected element first.
- Locked issues are not sent.
Unlike the spell check itself, this step sends the issue details to the AI provider you use with AI Assistant. See Review AI changes.
Spell check while you type
When you edit text directly on the page, Pinegrow underlines possible misspellings as you type. Fix the word, and the underline disappears.
To turn this off, open Support & Settings › Settings… and clear Check spelling while editing text in the Editing section.
Spell Check cannot run while you are editing text (Finish inline text editing before running spell check.). Click Done on the text editing toolbar first.
Choose the spelling language
By default, Spell Check uses the first language it finds, in this order:
- The
langattribute of the element or one of its parents. - The language set for the page.
- The
langattribute of the page'shtmlelement. - The project default language.
- The global default language, English (US) unless you change it.
To choose a language, click the language settings button in the Spell Check window. In the Spell check language dialog, choose a Language and where to apply it with Apply to: Current check only, Selected element, This page, Project default or Global default. Selected element adds a lang attribute to the element.
You can also use Page › Spell check language, Spell check › Language in an element's right-click menu, Spell check language in the project menu (click the project name in the Project panel), and Spell check default language in Support & Settings › Settings….
Download a dictionary
When a check or a language choice needs German, Italian or Spanish for the first time in a project, Pinegrow asks Download spelling dictionary? and shows the dictionary's license and source. Click Download. Pinegrow downloads the dictionary from the Pinegrow dictionary server, verifies it and saves it in the project's _pginfo/spellcheck/dictionaries folder. Each project keeps its own copy.
Downloading needs an open project and an internet connection. If you cancel, text in that language is skipped and the status says the dictionary is not installed. Text in a language that Spell Check does not support is skipped and listed as unsupported. Spell Check recognizes the codes en, en-US, de, de-DE, it, it-IT, es and es-ES, so a page with lang="en-GB", for example, is listed as unsupported. To check it, set a language for the page or choose one in the Spell check language dialog.