LanguageTool Integration

[Terkyz]

I'm not entirely sure if this would be possible to implement because I can't find any information regarding the LanguageTool API, but I'd still like to share my idea.

My idea is that when you have Linguistic installed, a little bubble appears on the right side of the text boxes that indicates the number of spelling errors that have been detected within that text box, and when you touch the extension icon, an option called "Grammar" appears, which is basically a text box where you place text and it detects grammatical errors, in the style of LanguageToo addon.

This is probably out of the scope of Linguistic but it seemed to me an interesting implementation if it were possible, and if besides having some purpose, the developers agree with it.

[vitonsky]

I don't mind about any potential integrations that would be suitable.

The behavior in current representation is too far of Linguist purposes, because we must keep Linguist are user friendly, independent and as simple and minimal as possible.

I see next problems with proposed behavior:

1. We interfere in web pages design code, when we draw counter beside text boxes. This is what we avoid in Linguist. Injected elements may looks inappropriate and out of site design. This may completely broke user experience for people who installed Linguist. Site must looks as designers intended. Maybe we could implement it if we would have good ideas for unobtrusive design, so you can propose ideas and references if you have. It probably will take time for research

2. when you touch the extension icon, an option called "Grammar" appears, which is basically a text box where you place text and it detects grammatical errors, in the style of LanguageToo addon

   It would broke current behaviour. When user click by extension icon, we show the extension popup with all controls. This behavior are important and may not be replaced with any other behaviour, because it will decrease possible actions user may do with one click. So we need another behaviour here. We could add new tab in popup (currently we have 2 tabs - "Page translation" and "Text translation").

3. Which API we can use except LanguageTool? The Linguist is not just a wrapper over google translate or other API. Linguist is a full featured frontend for translation in browser, who provide API to implement any translation service. It means that we may replace a Google translator to Yandex or Deepl or any other service at any time. Even if Google will die, Linguist will works fine. In case user no have internet - we may use embedded offline translator. I scrupulous explain it to demonstrate idea that Linguist is not depend of any service. And this is super power, so if we want to implement some new feature like Grammar enhancer (i like this idea) we have to ensure it will works always, even if most popular service will die tomorrow. It means that we should research and find multiple services who implement this feature and provide API, we have to find opensource alternatives and try to find some offline solution. If we can find enough solutions, we can implement it in Linguist. So if you really interesting in this feature, you may try research and then summarize found information in this issue. It would be valuable contribution

If you really want this feature, you could help me with research and if your research would be successful, i would implement this feature in code. Grammar correction is actually related to linguist purpose - assisting with text reading and writing.