Release notes

Enhancements

Added option diabledRules in WProofreader that allows specifying an array of grammar rules to be disabled for all users. Check this guide for details.

Bug fixes

Random crashes of the WebSpellChecker license after the stop and start of the AWS EC2 instance (m5.xlarge type)

Enhancements

Languages

• Added support of many dictionaries for a single language in the additional language group. This can come in handy if there is a need to have a bilingual or multilingual spell checker. Previously, it was available only for the default group of languages.
• The Arabic language dictionary has been extended with around 500 words. These are the most popular words that were flagged as correct ones.

Spelling check

• The quality of spelling check has been improved for the Cloud services by prioritizing suggestions based on the aggregated statistical data received from the prior use of the services. 

Supported deployments

• Published the latest Docker images of WebSpellChecker/WProofreader on Docker Hub with version 5.6.1.

Other

• The size of a single user dictionary is limited to 50KB (around 10K words). This functionality is designed for end users and not supposed to be used as a global dictionary for the whole organization. Instead it is suggested to use the global custom dictionaries. Having large user dictionaries may lead to performance degradation.

Bug fixes

• [WP-3407] Grammar engine: Disabled the grammar rule that suggested that using both -z and -s ending are possible in British English (e.g. realized)
• [WP-3437] Grammar engine: Eliminated recursive suggestion of the same correction asking not to put space before a full stop 
• [WP-3419] WProofreader: Tooltip for a language selector in the badge is missing

Enhancements

WProofreader

• Added ability to select a language for checking directly from the WProofreader badge without going to settings. It can be enabled using enableLanguagesInBadgeButton option. By default, it is disabled. 
• Restored the functionality of detecting the browser language and using it for the WProofreader interface localization. If not detected automatically, the default language for localization will be used. It defaults to American English.
• Extended the ignore all functionality to be applied globally for a whole page instead of being limited to a single instance. After the browser’s page reload, the ignored information will be reset. 
• Improved support and integrations with two modern rich text editors: Slate.js and Draft.
• Added a new onStatistics callback function that allows listening to such actions made when using the app: replace a problem, ignore all problems, add a word to the dictionary, remove a word from the dictionary. Check API documentation for details.

Languages

• Added a new medical dictionary for the Spanish language. It contains 5,201 terms. Go to the demo and on the language tab of the settings page, select Spanish.
• Extended the French medical dictionary with new 177 terms.
• Enabled the English medical dictionary for New Zealand English.
• Extended default language dictionaries with new terms as follows:

Language	New words	Total words	Description
French (fr_FR)	2,812	321,523	French spelling reform
German (de_DE)	1,263	2,301,750	Medical terms, the most popular words added to user dictionaries.
Danish (da_DK)	565	311,122	Medical terms
Dutch (nl_NL)	1,248	425,411	Medical terms
Italian (it_IT)	386	2,904,302	Medical terms
Portuguese (pt_PT)	1,130	993,633	Medical terms

Supported Deployments

• Published the latest Docker images of WebSpellChecker/WProofreader on Docker Hub with version 5.6.0.

Other

• Moved WProofreader API documentation to https://webspellchecker.com/docs/api/wscbundle/Options.html

Bug Fixes

• [WP-3391] WProofreader: WProofreader: Badge overlaps browser scrolls on Windows
• [WP-3384] WProofreader: Broken styles and shifted underlines in the WordPress images description
• [WP-3381] WProofreader: Long words in the problem section of the dialog mode broke the styles
• [WP-3380] SCAYT for CKEditor 4: Additional symbols are added after misspelled word
• [WP-3396] SCAYT for CKEditor 4: IndexSizeError in browser console when a user replace underlined word with mention from the drop list
• [WP-3377] Disable WHITESPACE_RULE for WSC Dialog plugin for CKEditor 4
• [WP-3385] Incorrect name is used for the German language in the UI localization

Enhancements

WProofreader

• Turned on the spelling check option ignoreWordsWithNumbers that during check ignores words with numbers (e.g. 1st, 2nd, etc.). This change was dictated by user feedback reflected on the statistics of the most popular words added to dictionaries. 
• The Auto Detect option that auto-defines a language based on the user input is pinned to the top of the language list for faster access and convenience.

Grammar Engine

• The 3rd party grammar engine, LanguageTool, has been upgraded to v4.9. As a part of this upgrade new and improved grammar rules for the next languages have been added: Catalan, Dutch, English, French, German, Portuguese, Ukrainian and small improvements for Russian. Moreover, the basic support of grammar checking is enabled for the Arabic language.

Languages

Enlarged the English medical dictionaries with new terms:

• The medical dictionary for American English has been extended to 204,932 words (12,665 new terms).
• The medical dictionary for British, Canadian, Australian English has been extended to 157,743 words (17,227 new terms).

Licensing Mechanism

• Improved the mechanism of licensing for the Server version. Now there will be a set of attempts to reactivate a license automatically that is about to expire (7 days, 1 day, 1 hour and 10 minutes before expiration). All the attempts and their statuses will be recorded in the log files.
• Added a separate parameter AutoLicenseReactivation in AppServerX.xml that allows disabling the attempts to reactivate a license automatically. It may come in handy if a server doesn’t have access to the Internet and manual license activation is a preferable option.

Web API

The API command detect_language that detects a language has been improved:

• Now it can detect up to 3 languages in the given piece of text.
• It returns a full name, short code and the proportion ratio of the detected language in the text.

Refer to the Detect language command for Cloud and Server versions accordingly.

Supported Deployments

Published the latest Docker images of WebSpellChecker/WProofreader on Docker Hub.

Installers

• Added a set of additional parameters that enable the use of the floating licensing with the automated silent install on Linux-based environments.
• Enabled the extended description for errors that might appear during installation (e.g. appcmd.exe returned code 3: [problem description]).
• Updated the Windows and Linux-based installers on the step with specification of the AppServer port number, additional explanation messages are added to explain which ports can be used. 

Other

• Minor changes in the demo samples that are shipped with the Server package.
  • Updated CDN versions of CKEditor 4, Froala Editor and TinyMCE 4.
  • Corrected instructions for the path of SCAYT plugin (from ckscayt.js to wscbundle.js).
• Improved the error descriptions from the WebSpellChecker backend. Now information about failed requests can be found in the browser console.

Bug Fixes

• [WP-3334] WProofreader: Clicking on ‘More Misc’ icon of Froala increases the number of errors shown on the badge
• [WP-3335] WProofreader: Switching to ‘Code View’ of Froala increases the number of errors shown on the badge by 2-times

Enhancements

WProofreader v2.4

• Improved the overall performance of WProofreader at least by 3 times including the visual mechanism responsible for highlighting problems as a user is typing in rich text editors. 
• Improved the highlighting mechanism in the textarea elements, the delay between checks decreased from 2s to 500ms.
• Added a new theme option to change the default style theme of WProofreader. The available theme options: default, gray, custom. The custom theme allows modifying the default theme using CSS styles. For details, refer to the how-to guides how to tailor the theme to fit your needs for the Cloud and Server versions accordingly.
• Introduced new callback functions onAddWordToUserDictionary and onDeleteWordFromUserDictionary to track when a word is added or removed from a personal user dictionary. 
• Added an extra callback function onCommitOptions that allows monitoring the changes in the spellcheck ignore options and a selected language.
• Initialization using auto-search (autoSearch:true) will respect spellcheck=”false” attribute in HTML textarea and input elements and won’t be started at all. However, this won’t be applied to the rich text editors.
• Added a separate data-wsc=”false” attribute that will instruct auto-search functionality not to start in the element that has such an attribute. This attribute won’t be taken into consideration if the application is started manually using init() method.
• Extended the ignore elements list with code and pre elements that will be ignored during the check.

Languages

• Added a language auto-detection functionality that supports over 80 languages based on the CLD2 library. It is available as an option Auto Detect on the language list. This option will come in handy for those who are working with multilingual content as they no longer need to switch between languages. It can be set as a default language for all users, the language code is auto.
• The American English dictionary was enlarged with 65 new words which were the most added words to the user dictionaries. Some of them are: cybersecurity, blockchain, Pinterest, Reddit, telework.
• The hottest discussed topic and the most popular words added to the dictionaries were the words related to the coronavirus pandemic and healthcare. We’ve added coronavirus, COVID-19, сoronaviruses to the American English, British and Canadian English dictionaries. The rest healthcare and medical related terms are already present in our specialized medical dictionary.

Web API

• A single API request is limited to 50KB of text which is around 50K characters including spaces. The maximum size of the request can be extended in the Server version using a special parameter. Longer requests will be rejected and not processed. To overcome this, the request should be divided into smaller parts.
• A new command detect_language added for detecting a language of given text. For details, refer to the guides for the Cloud and Server versions accordingly.

AppServer

• Added a new parameter MaxApiRequestSize to regulate the size of the maximum allowed API request that will be processed by AppServer. 
• Updated POCO lib to the latest major release 1.10.1.

Supported Deployments

• Published a new Docker image with the Server version of WebSpellChecker/WProofreader with the SSL support. Now there are two prebuilt images with WebSpellChecker/WProofreader available on Docker Hub. You may find more information on that and how to create your custom image using Dockerfile in the updated guide Installing WebSpellChecker Server using Docker and in our GitHub repo. 

Bug Fixes

WProofreader

• [WP-3274] WProofreader: Suggestion popup has wrong height in Draft.js editor.

This is a hot fix release to revert the update introduced in v5.5.7 for the Australian English language where we changed the spellcheck engine source and dictionary to the original one. The reason for this rollback is the incompatibility of the medical dictionary and Australian English running under the new engine. 

Bug Fixes

WProofreader

• [WP-3197] WProofreader: Underlines are not removed for the words which are in the dictionary after it’s connected
• [WP-3198] WProofreader: JS error ”Cannot read property ‘setFocus’ of null at wscbundle.js:44” in console when a user deletes a user dictionary
• [WP-3256], GitHub #21: WProofreader: Incorrect highlighting of problems in track changes feature of CKEditor 5
• [WP-3263] WProofreader: Scroll to the next problem doesn’t work after replace/add word/Ignore all in “Proofread in dialog” mode
• [WP-3264] WProofreader: Problems remain highlighted in the editor after using Ignore all in the “Proofread in dialog” mode
• [WP-3192] WProofreader: Missing or multiple whitespace problem type is incorrectly displayed in the “Proofread in dialog” mode 

Languages Dictionaries

• [WP-3266] AppServer: ‘No_any_suggestions’ returns as suggestion for request with Greek language

Enhancements

Grammar Engine

The 3rd party grammar engine, LanguageTool, has been upgraded to v4.8. As a part of this upgrade new and improved grammar rules for the next languages have been added: Catalan, Chinese (new tokenization), Danish, English, French, German,  Portuguese, Russian, Ukrainian.

Bug Fixes

• [WP-3236] WProofreader / SCAYT plugin for CKEditor 4: Incorrect work with spaces in Japanese causes an incorrect position of underlines and further unresponsiveness

This is a minor release of both Cloud and Server packages intended to fix an issue with the custom dictionaries functionality that didn’t function for French Canadian, English Canadian, British English and Brazilian Portuguese.

Bug Fixes

• [WP-3232] Custom dictionaries functionality didn’t function for French Canadian (fr_CA), English Canadian (en_CA), British English (en_GB) and Brazilian Portuguese (pt_BR).
• [WP-3230] Arabic localization is missing for Japanese, Simplified Chinese and Ukrainian languages

Enhancements

WProofreader v2.3

• Added localization of the default language list on the Language tab of the settings dialog to a language that is set by the localization option.

Languages Updates

• Improved the quality of spelling check in the Arabic language by prioritization of suggestions given for a misspelled word.
• Updated and enlarged language dictionaries for the following languages: Norwegian Bokmål, Norwegian Nynorsk, Slovak, Indonesian, Catalan, Korean, Chilean Spanish, Ukrainian, Polish, Austrian German, Hungarian, Bulgarian, Azerbaijani or Azeri (Latin alphabet), Hindi, Macedonian, Croatian, Uzbek (Cyrillic alphabet), Latvian, Georgian, Mongolian. You can test the quality of the updated dictionaries on the additional dictionaries page.
• Changed the dictionary source for Australian English language to improve the quality of the check.

Enhancements

WProofreader v2.3.3915

• Added UI localization for the Simplified Chinese and Japanese languages.
• Minor improvements accessibility based on the accessibility validation tools (reports).
• The height of the section with the list of words on the Dictionaries tab is increased to 360 pixels to improve usability.

Languages Updates

1. Extended dictionaries of the Norwegian dialects:

• Norwegian Bokmål (nb_NO)
• Norwegian Nynorsk (nn_NO)

Check the quality of spell checking for Norwegian Bokmål and Nynorsk at the Additional languages page.

2. New additional languages for the Asian group. This release enables the long-awaited grammar checking for two new languages from the Asian group:

• Simplified Chinese (zh_CN) 
• Japanese (ja_JP)

Check the quality of grammar checking for Simplified Chinese and Japanese at our Additional languages demo page.

3. Enabled a new grammar rule for all English dialects that catches repeated whitespaces in writing. The rule description is “Whitespace repetition (bad formatting)”.

Bug Fixes

WProofreader

• [WP-3149] WProofreader: Highlighting of a selected language is cropped in Languages tab when using keyboard navigation
• [WP-3153] WProofreader: Redundant ‘aria-level’ and ‘aria-expanded’ tags with empty value present in button snippets
• [WP-3155] WProofreader: Some elements have insufficient color contrast 
• [WP-3157] WProofreader: Invalid ARIA attribute values for ‘aria-labelledby’ tag in checkboxes, radio buttons and inputs
• [WP-3158] WProofreader: Invalid ARIA roles used
• [WP-3180] WProofreader: Badge disappears in iframe
• [WP-3168] WProofreader: Actions in the badge are shifted in the expanded/active state
• [WP-3163] WProofreader: Insufficient styles protection of elements

SCAYT plugin for CKEditor 4

• [WP-3172] SCAYT plugin for CKEditor 4: Unsupported locale parameter ‘ru’ when browser localization is set to Russian

Enhancements

WProofreader v2.3

1. This version brings major user interface updates for WProofreader based on the user feedback that we collected:

• Both WProofreader dialog and the badge have more contrast colors for all elements, including the icons and the color of the text being checked.
• When using keyboard navigation to move around WProofreader dialog, badge, and Settings dialog, you can benefit from the addition highlighting of the elements currently in focus.
• We have extended and simplified each view of the Settings sections, including Languages, Options, and Dictionaries.
• Pop-up notifications on the changes made in the Settings sections now appear at the bottom of the dialog to avoid overlapping of the top section of WProofreader dialog.
• Improved experience and working with dictionaries allowing even easier to disconnect the dictionaries which may be no longer required and connect them any time later. 
• When proofreading in a dialog mode now, users see only one discovered problem and suggestions to it at a time allowing easier navigation and better user experience in text proofreading.

For details, refer to the updated version of WProofreader User guide for the Server and Cloud.

2. Improvements in accessibility and navigation. We have revised and updated the already existing navigation when using a keyboard only:

• The keyboard combinations are now simplified.
• We have introduced Space as one more key to confirm your actions or changes made in addition to the Enter key which could be used before.
• User interface response is now better as the highlighting of the selected element is more precise and contrasting with the rest of the UI.
• You can navigate between the discovered problems and their suggestions using either left and right arrow keys when proofreading in WProofreader dialog.

For details, refer to the updated version of WProofreader keyboard navigation guide for the Server and Cloud versions.

User Guides

We have updated our previous versions of WProofreader user guide and keyboard navigation with a new version to describe the most recent interface changes and keyboard accessibility improvements.

• User guide and Keyboard navigation for the Server version;
• User guide and Keyboard navigation for the Cloud version.

AppServer

• POCO C++ library has been- updated to v1.10.0.

Supported Deployments

The Server version of WebSpellChecker/WProofreader is available as a Docker image on Docker Hub. You may find more information on that in a new guide Installing WebSpellChecker Server using Docker and in our GitHub repo.

Bug Fixes

WProofreader

• [WP-3124] WProofreader: Virtual markup with underlined problems shifts if to open an editor in a full screen
• [WP-3127] WProofreader: Memory leaks in Internet Explorer 11 and MS Edge
• [WP-3135] WProofreader: The grammar problem description tooltip is not capitalized
• [WP-3129] WProofreader: Incorrect color of the number of errors in the badge when integrated into TinyMCE 4 (black instead of white)
• [WP-3145] WProofreader: Bootstrap label type overwrites dialog settings and languages list labels style
• [WP-3146] WProofreader: Foundation CSS styles breaks checkboxes alignment on the Options tab

AppServer

• [WP-3138]: AppServer: Сonstant AppServerX.xml warning message due to the default CacheSavePath ‘none’ value
• [WP-3120]: AppServer: Some SSL certificates failed to load from Windows Certificate Store to enable SSL connection with AppServer