Release notes

Enhancements

WProofreader

• Improved mechanism of highlighting and replacing problems in textarea elements.

AppServer

• Added and improved notifications when using AppServer commands such start.sh and stop.sh on Linux. For example, when running start.sh script, there will be a message indicating that AppServer is starting and there will be an additional message confirming that AppServer started or there was an error. 

Bug fixes

WProofreader

• [WP-3588] WProofreader: Misaligned badge if iframe body is min-height 100%

Engines

• [WP-3586] Suggestions for grammar problems are repeated in the Description section
• [GitHub #177] Soft hyphens cause problems

Enhancements

WProofreader

• Added a new API option restoreNativeSpellCheck that restores a native browser spell checker if WProofreader is switched to the disable state.

AI-based English

AI-based engine for general English has been integrated into the package. Compared with traditional engines built on a set of static rules and dictionaries, the accuracy and quality of the new engine is 3x higher. The algorithm digs deep in the context of every sentence and corrects tiny spelling, grammar, and punctuation mistakes.

• Enabled by default in the server-based package and can be enabled on demand for Cloud-based subscription as a separate language option. The name of the language is AI-based English (en_AI).
• Available for WProofreader add-on for rich text editors and WebSpellChecker API only. 

Try it here.

Additional references:

• WebSpellChecker Server v5.7.0 hardware requirements
• Enabling AI engine as grammar provider

Enhancements

WProofreader

• Improved paragraph-based mechanism for larger text proofreading to decrease load on a client’s browser.
• Minor improvements to the French and Canadian French localization.
• Enhanced Ignore functionality.

AppServer

Added three new parameters to the AppServerX.xml file:

• VerificationMode regulates the severity of a client’s SSL certificate verification process; 
• PathToLogsDirectory sets a path to the Logs folder where system messages and errors are recorded. By default: …/Installation_path/AppServer/Logs;
• PathToServiceFilesDirectory defines a custom path for the license.xml file.

Bug fixes

• [GitHub #175] SCAYT plugin for CKEditor 4 stopped working in old IEs (IE9-IE10)
• [WP-3522] Global custom dictionary: The last word in the list is ignored unless an extra space is added at the end of a file
• [WP-3530] WSC Dialog plugin for CKEditor 4: Add word/Create dictionary/Ignore options stopped working in Chrome 80 and later versions

Bug fixes

• [WP-3512] Misleading error message in logs files “Error | Could not save license. System exception” was replaced with “Warning | Failed to update information in the license file”. This warning shows that WebSpellChecker AppServer couldn’t overwrite the license file. However, it doesn’t affect the license work, and it continues to work as usual.
• [WP-3513] SSL certificate settings: TLS version defaults to outdated v1.1 and results in net::ERR_SSL_OBSOLETE_VERSION in Google Chrome.
• [WP-3504] API request with several elements in tokens and user_wordlist returns an incorrect response. As a result, the word from the dictionary is not recognized as a correct one.

Enhancements

WProofreader

• Added new ignoreAttributes and ignoreClasses options that enable advanced mechanisms for skipping elements by classes and attributes during text check.

AppServer

• Security improvement in the SSL/TLS configuration when the direct connection is used with AppServer. The DH (Diffie-Hellman) key size is extended from 1024-bit up to 2048-bit to comply with security standards.

Grammar engine

• The 3rd party grammar engine, LanguageTool, has been upgraded to v5.0. As a part of this upgrade new and improved grammar rules for the next languages have been added: Arabic, Catalan, Dutch, French, German, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Ukrainian.
• Added the ability to enable n-gram data sets to detect errors with words that are often confused, like their and there. It is available for the group of English dialects, German, French, Spanish, and Dutch languages. This option is automatically enabled for all languages except English in the Cloud-based version for all customers with enabled grammar checking. To enable n-gram support in an on-premises installation, refer to this guide.

Docker image

• Published the latest Docker images of WebSpellChecker/WProofreader on Docker Hub with version 5.6.3.0.

Bug fixes

• [WP-3468]: Broken predefined user dictionary functionality if a dictionary is created dynamically. 500 error is returned to a request with a nonexistent user dictionary.

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:

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