Spell checker for Etherpad

Toggle on/off 'SpellCheck' option in Settings. Uses your native browser spellchecker

Browser support

This plugin does not spell check anything itself. All it does is flip the standard HTML spellcheck attribute on the editor body (Etherpad's #innerdocbody) between true and false. Finding misspellings, choosing a dictionary and drawing the red underlines is entirely the browser's job.

That means the plugin can only work where the browser ships a spell checker:

Browser	Misspellings underlined?
Firefox, Chrome, Edge, Safari on desktop	Yes
Chrome on Android, Safari on iOS	Yes
Firefox on Android	No — Gecko's spell checker is compiled out of the Android build, so no web page can get underlines there. See Mozilla bug 1541697.

If words are not underlined on Firefox for Android, the toggle is still doing its job — there is simply no spell checker behind it. Autocorrect suggestions from the on-screen keyboard are unaffected either way.

Which dictionary / language is used?

The browser's, not Etherpad's. Etherpad sets lang on the outer page from the UI language, but the editor lives in nested iframes that carry no lang attribute, so the browser falls back to its own default dictionary (whatever the user configured in the browser or the OS). Changing the Etherpad interface language does not change the spell checking language.

Set spellcheck off as default

1. Open settings.json
2. Append: ep_spellcheck: { disabledByDefault : true }

TODO

• Remember user settings as cookies

Installation

Install from the Etherpad admin UI (Admin → Manage Plugins, search for ep_spellcheck and click Install), or from the Etherpad root directory:

pnpm run plugins install ep_spellcheck

⚠️ Don't run npm i / npm install yourself from the Etherpad source tree — Etherpad tracks installed plugins through its own plugin-manager, and hand-editing package.json can leave the server unable to start.

After installing, restart Etherpad.