[Tex/LaTex] How to perform advanced spell checking of latex documents

grammarproofreadingspelling

I'm looking for a way to integrate something like After the Deadline or a similarly sophisticated spell checking tool into writing LaTeX documents. I don't mind it hitting the network each time. I already use flyspell-mode in AucTeX.

Edit

After the deadline is a webapp service which checks text for spell checking, grammar and style. In some ways it is similar to Microsfot Word spell-checking, more specifically green underline suggestions. After the deadline is used on wordpress.com and there are firefox/chromium/openoffice plugins for it. I was wondering if anyone managed to get this or any other similar spell checker to work with LaTeX documents to check grammar and style. I'm asking for something which will parse the whole sentences, and not just words.

Best Answer

You can use the detex tool to strip LaTeX commands. If you do detex file.tex, it will output to stdout. Then, you can use the diction tool to analyse your text, and suggest improvements. Putting it all together:

detex file.tex | diction -bs

This will strip the LaTeX, and pipe it into diction with suggestions and "beginner mistakes" enabled.

For Debian/Ubuntu:

sudo apt-get install diction texlive-extra-utils

This will install detex and diction, as well as several other useful tools.

Since you mentioned that you're using Emacs, there is also diction.el which provides diction integration with Emacs. You can do M-x diction-buffer, and it will take care of detexing/dehtmling and show the diction results in a separate buffer. You can even hit enter on the individual results to be taken to approximately where the phrase is.

(If you do use diction.el, my version of detex didn't have the -C flag. I'm not sure of what it was meant to do, but if you search for 'detex -C' in the file, you can add other command line options if you want. Also, I recommend replacing 'diction -L' with 'diction -bsL')

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[Tex/LaTex] Spell checking LaTeX documents

It sort of depends on the system you're working on.

I'm using GNU/Linux and here aspell does a good job. For instance, to check test.tex in Danish, I would do like this from the terminal:

aspell -c -t test.tex -d da

The option -c tells aspell to check the file, -t puts it in TeX mode, and -d gives the base name of the main dictionary to use. On Ubuntu/Debian, this can be installed using:

sudo aptitude install aspell

Aspell is also available as a Windows executable. It can but run from the command line or from any good text-editor (i.e. one that supports macros to run external programs).

[Tex/LaTex] Grammar-checking tool for use with LaTeX

LanguageTool is a very nice standalone, Java-based grammar checker. However, it works on plain text. Therefore, I needed to convert my LaTeX document to as plain as possible text document - Not a simple task. I managed to do it using the following trick:

I arranged for all floats to hold their positions using the floats package and the H option. This is required so that captions won't break the paragraphs when transforming to plain text.
I removed line numbers using the nopageno package.
I used a sed script to do some more fine-tuning, like adding periods to section names and description labels. I don't publish the script here, since that it is really specific to my-own style and conventions.
After this preprocessing, I compiled to DVI and ran catdvi -s.
I used another simple sed script to get rid of empty lines and page breaks. The final result is a reasonable textual conversion of the LaTeX document, which LanguageTool can work on.

There are still some leftover annoyances, like inlined program listings, which the grammar checker can't understand, but all together I got a decent automated proof-checking from it :)

Best Answer

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[Tex/LaTex] Spell checking LaTeX documents

[Tex/LaTex] Grammar-checking tool for use with LaTeX

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