Spell checking in TinyMCE with Firefox or Safari Solved!
Aptuitiv Studio uses the TinyMCE editor as our rich-text editor for editing pages and other content. We've recently gotten a few requests to support spell checking in Firefox and decided to find out why it wasn't working.
The problem
Firefox and Safari have a really nice built-in spell check system that will underline misspelled words with a red line. If you right click with your mouse then you'll get a menu that will give suggested spellings. Misspelled words do get underlined in Aptuitiv Studio, however, when you right click in the TinyMCE editor you get a different menu and that menu doesn't include any spell check options.
The simple solution
Step 1 - Take your index finger and hold down the CTRL key.
Step 2 - At the same time right click with your mouse with your other hand.
That's it, hold CTRL and right click. You'll then get the normal browser menu that gives you all the spell checking options that you want.
A more technical answer
This one is for those developers using TinyMCE for their own projects.
In order for the red underlines to show for misspelled words you need to have the gecko_spellcheck option set to true.
If you don't want to have to hold CTRL while you right click then you can disable the editor's context menu by removing contextmenu from the list of plugins. However, I don't recommend this because there is a lot of power and convenience in the editor's menu because it is context sensitive and provides shortcuts to editing the type of content you right clicked on.
Posted in: Tips, Tricks and Best Practices
3 Comments on "Spell checking in TinyMCE with Firefox or Safari Solved!"
MrBarns says:
Hey very nice blog!!....I'm an instant fan, I have bookmarked you and I'll be checking back on a regular....See ya
Seth Harris says:
Thanks for the comment and the bookmark. We are glad you enjoyed the post.
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Sid Martin says:
This is very helpful! Once in a while I want the default Firefox context menu, so this trick will surely be a time saver.