How to Use Ginger and LanguageTool to Check Grammar?
Rituraj Kalita
   July 2012  

        Ginger 2.5.x is a wonderful (Windows-based) free grammar-checking utility for English texts (for both its US and UK variations), though not usable at present in case of any non-English language. It corrects spelling mistakes (e.g., "fulll"), ordinary grammatical mistakes ("he were present") and, strikingly, even contextual mistakes in using words ("too be or not too be"). The download size is moderate (~ 12 MB at present) as well. However, the major trouble with Ginger is that you must be connected to the Internet to use Ginger - and if your Internet speed is slow, your grammar check in it will be slow as well. Another significant problem is that Ginger, at present, works only with a few Microsoft Office applications (e.g., Word) and also with editable texts (such as e-mail texts) within either Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox. So, someone using another word processor (e.g., AbiWord or PageBreeze) and not having Microsoft Office would find it difficult to use Ginger - even pasting the written text into Notepad or WordPad won't help as Ginger doesn't work even with them. But there is a way out, and that is to have a place within a handy webpage to paste editable texts produced by such a word processor. This (i.e., www.riturajkalita.webs.com/ginger.html) is such a handy webpage, and below is the place to paste your text produced in any word processor. You may easily have Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox (it either comes with Windows or is free), and view this webpage there. So, get Ginger downloaded and installed (after that, it would get launched whenever you turn your computer on), then within this page paste your editable text (a few lines or even a few paragraphs) below, and then press the F2 key to invite Ginger! However, to change the choice of English to the US or the UK variation before checking the text, you'll need to right-click at the green Ginger icon lying on the system tray (see the bottom-right corner of your desktop) and then choose English - US or English - UK. Once thus opted, this option will remain same in your computer till you change it again.

Paste (or type) your text below, then press F2 to check that with Ginger:

        How successful is Ginger in its work? To check that, I typed There hands was fulll! within the above box and pressed F2. Wow, it found all the three errors of the three different kinds: the spelling mistake in fulll, the grammatical mistake regarding was and the contextual mistake about the use of There! See the screenshot below:

Ginger working

        However, sometimes, we might get a feeling that Ginger is acting overconfident! It may be so that you actually wanted to mean There, the hands were full - but Ginger never gives you a second suggestion, unlike Microsoft Word does. In such a case, you'll have to just ignore its single suggestion, and try to find the desired correction yourself!

        If you're unhappy with the slower speed of Ginger or with its Internet requirement, or if you need to check texts in a non-English language, you should go for the free LanguageTool 1.8 (the stand-alone version). Don't get disheartened by testing the LanguageTool facility online on its website: the downloaded tool has a much better user interface and allows spell-checking, unlike the on-web tool. The download is somewhat large (~ 50 MB at present), but it includes the spelling and grammar checking database for all the languages presently included (from Belarusian to Chinese) within the project! Also, however, a ~ 20 MB free download (as well as installation) of Java (i.e., Java-TM Platform SE binary) - version 6 or higher - needs to be performed before LanguageTool could work. But such pain may be well worth, although some contextual mistakes such as the one in There hands were full! can't be presently detected by LanguageTool, unlike in the case with Ginger. However, some contextual errors such as those in Too be or not too be? do surely get detected, as shown in the following screenshot:

LanguageTool Example

        The main advantages of LanguageTool over Ginger are, however, its speed and its range of allowed languages. Thus, a 232-word paragraph in Spanish needed only ~ 1 second in LanguageTool to get checked, as shown below:

LanguageTool with Spanish text

        LanguageTool comes as an archive (.zip) file that needs to be extracted after downloading. If Java 6 (or one of its higher versions) remains installed in the computer, the LanguageToolGUI.jar file (found within the folder created after extraction) needs to be double-clicked to run LanguageTool as shown above (paste your own text within its top window). If nothing happens after double-clicking that file, enter (i.e., type in and press Enter) the command java -jar LanguageToolGUI.jar at the command prompt (obviously, after choosing the relevant LanguageTool folder - say, C:\LanguageTool, while within the Command Prompt). For more details about using the Command Prompt, see the discussions on using Tesseract-OCR here.

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