Checking text straight from your blog editor

Two ways to get a draft into the checker

Most Japanese writing that ends up on the web is typed into a box that belongs to someone else: the post editor of a blog service, the admin screen of a CMS, a product description field in a shop back end. The checker lives on its own page, so the draft has to travel. There are two ways to move it.

The first is plain copy and paste. Select the text in your editor, copy it, open the checker on the front page and paste it into the box. This always works, on every device, and it is the method to fall back on whenever anything else misbehaves.

The second is a bookmarklet: a bookmark that runs a few lines of script instead of opening a fixed address. When you click it, it takes the text you have selected on the current page and opens the checker in a new tab with that text already loaded. If nothing is selected, it takes the whole contents of the text box or text area your cursor is in. To install it, drag the button below to your bookmarks bar.

Adding the bookmarklet to your browser

Bookmarklets live in the bookmarks bar, the strip under the address bar where your saved links sit. If you cannot see it, turn it on first: in Chromium-based browsers and in Firefox it is an option in the bookmarks menu, usually called something like "Show bookmarks bar" or "Bookmarks toolbar". Safari has a similar setting under its View menu, where the bar is called Favorites.

Then:

1. Press and hold the mouse button on the button on this page.
2. Drag it up onto the bookmarks bar and let go.
3. A new bookmark appears. You can rename it to something short, such as "Check JP", by right-clicking it and choosing the edit option.

Clicking the button on this page does nothing useful by itself, because there is no draft here to send. It only works once it is in your bookmarks.

If dragging does not work in your browser, right-click the button, copy the link address, create a new bookmark by hand and paste the copied address into its URL field. The address starts with javascript:, which is normal for a bookmarklet.

Using it while you write

The routine is short:

1. Write or paste your draft into the blog editor as usual.
2. Save it as a draft (more on why below).
3. Select the part you want checked. To send everything in a plain text area, you can simply click inside it without selecting anything.
4. Click the bookmarklet. The checker opens in a new tab with your text in place.
5. Read the results, then switch back to the editor tab and make the corrections there.

The checker does not write anything back into your editor. Corrections are always made by you, in the original, which is how it should be: a rule-based tool flags things that are fine as often as it catches things that are wrong, and you are the one who decides. The guide to using the checker explains how to read the result list and which rule groups (Basic, Readability, Style) you can switch off.

Checking the title and the body separately

A post title and a post body are different kinds of text, and it helps to send them one at a time. Titles are often noun phrases with no sentence ending at all, or they are written in the plain da style while the body uses desu/masu. Sent together, a title like 初心者のための敬語入門 (shoshinsha no tame no keigo nyūmon, "an introduction to keigo for beginners") sitting above a polite body can trigger a style-mixing warning that tells you nothing.

So click in the title field and use the bookmarklet with nothing selected; it sends just the title. Then do the same in the body. In the title, look mainly for conversion slips, half-width katakana and stray full-width letters. In the body, the readability and style checks earn their keep.

What the bookmarklet cannot reach

A bookmarklet only sees the page it is run on. Several common situations put your text out of its reach.

Editors inside an iframe

Many rich-text editors, the kind with bold and italic buttons and a live preview, draw the writing area inside a frame: a separate small page embedded in the main one. The bookmarklet runs in the outer page and cannot see a selection made inside the frame, so it either opens the checker empty or sends the wrong thing. Two fixes: switch the editor to its HTML, text or code view if it has one (that view is usually an ordinary text area), or copy and paste.

Editable areas that are not text boxes

Some editors let you type straight into the page rather than into a form field. Selecting text there works, but the "nothing selected" fallback only knows about text boxes and text areas. Select the text first.

Browser pages and viewers

Settings pages, the built-in PDF viewer and the start page of a new tab do not run bookmarklets.

Sites that block scripts

A few sites, and some browser security settings or extensions, stop bookmarklets from running. Nothing happens when you click. Use paste.

Phones and tablets

Mobile browsers rarely show a bookmarks bar. Copy and paste is the practical route there; the address-bar shortcut is another option on some browsers.

If the checker tab never appears, check whether the browser blocked it as a pop-up and allow pop-ups for the site you were writing on.

A note on HTML view

Sending from the HTML view brings the markup along with the words. Tags such as <p> and <a href="..."> are made of half-width letters and symbols, so the checker may report mixed full-width and half-width characters in lines that are mostly markup, and long lines of code can trip the long-sentence warning. Skip those results, or select only the visible text in the editor's preview when the editor allows it.

Where your text goes

Nowhere except your own browser. The bookmarklet places the text in the address of the new tab after a #t= marker, like this:

https://japaneseproofreader.com/#t=%E6%97%A5%E6%9C%AC%E8%AA%9E

That last part (the fragment, everything after #) is handled by browsers in a special way: it is never included in the request the browser sends to a web server. Our server receives a plain request for the front page and nothing else. The checker page then reads the fragment itself and runs its checks in your browser. Nothing is uploaded or stored by us.

Two things are still worth knowing. The full address, text included, is saved in your browser history like any other address, and if you sync your browser across devices the history may travel with it. And if you copy the address bar and send it to someone, you are sending them the draft. For a confidential document, paste the text into the checker instead, or clear the entry from your history afterwards.

Save first, and mind the length

Save the draft in your editor before you click. Opening a new tab does not normally affect the editor, but some admin screens time out, some log you out after a while, and some lose unsaved work when the browser is busy. A saved draft costs one click.

The checker accepts about 10,000 characters per check. That covers a long blog post, but a short book chapter will need to be split. Under 4,000 characters the results come back quicker and the list is easier to work through, so for long pieces it is often nicer to send one section at a time anyway: select from one heading to the next and click.

Length also affects the address itself. In the address, each kana or kanji becomes nine characters of code (three bytes, each written as % and two hex digits), so a long Japanese selection makes a very long address. Browsers cope with this, but if the checker opens with an empty box or with text cut off partway, send the draft in smaller pieces or paste it.

When something looks wrong

A few quick checks before you blame the bookmarklet:

• The checker opened but the box is empty: nothing was selected and the cursor was not in a plain text box, or the editor uses a frame. Select the text, or switch to HTML view.
• Only part of the post arrived: you probably had a partial selection. Click inside the text area without selecting, or select everything you want.
• The line numbers in the results do not match your editor: they count lines in the checker box, starting from the first line you sent, not lines in your post. Search the editor for the flagged text instead.