You could throw together a greasemonkey script to do this in minutes.

- On DOM ready, add a preview div under the textarea. - Bind to the textarea's change event, and have it update the preview div with the contents of the textarea. - Add a [Random!] button next to [add comment] - Bind to the [Random!] button to randomize the font, size, and colour of the preview div.

And with jQuery, that's probably 4 lines of code.

> I can read my own post 100 times and I'll be damned if I'll spot the "teh" that should have been a "the".

Firefox does come with a spell check plugin...

Ah but it's not just spelling errors, there's missing s-es on plurals and all kinds of other stuff that's technically spelled correctly.

It's an interesting idea. I don't remember ever thinking about previewing my text under a different style so I don't know if it would help me, but I would be willing to try it.

This reminds me of the commenting system that I think all the Gawker blogs use. There is a live preview directly above the comment field that shows exactly how the post is going to display on the page. A lot of forums do the same type of thing, but not live.

My brother has the same problem though, he can read and re-read right through his mistakes and never catch them unless they are pointed out to him. He's not dumb or illiterate, but I've always thought that he's mildly dyslexic.

Non-software solution: Try proofreading backwards.

This could be implemented a bookmarklet.

Hmm, I hadn't thought of that, it does sound like a great idea however. I think I'm off to look into bookmarklets.