I’ve re-kindled my interests in my spell checker. I’ve had someone request a few changes to the spell checker so I thought I’d document the code changes and updates to this project in blog format.

• Changing to a Decorator pattern

• • This means you can use the capability if you don’t want to extend the TextArea or RichTextEditor, also you can pass in your own TextField.

• Add left click menu capability, for people with touch screens, it’s a parameter in the decorator.
• Changed the graphics to be contained in the DisplayObjectContainer parent of the TextField, this allows for a much better underlining view. Also it removes the occasional trailing underlining that would show up when words had been hidden
• Changed the RegEx that identifies word boundaries to be more sensitive
• Now the underlining will respect all Capital word’s. If it’s capitalized from beginning to end of the word it will not be underlined.
• Words that are wrapped and mis-spelled will be underlined on each line it fills.
• I’ve tweaked some of how the highlight is checked to try to speed some things up, but any true speed increase will be left for something to do later.
• Added multiple event handlers to deal with focus in/focus out.
• Fixed an issue with constant lookups for updates to a word that was originally mis-spelled, this caused some odd highlighting with the updates completing and the new word not being underlined properly.

Things To Do

• Round off the Dictionary Management UI, to allow editing of the local dictionary contents, to remove added words.
• Work on speed performance.
• Update Dictionary for initial load so that the action script will decompress the contents, instead of relying on a server to do it for the end user.
• Create a new Demo.

Get the Source Code for the New Stuff!!!