jack@umbc5.umbc.edu (Jack Suess) (06/01/90)
Adding my two cents on the topic of spelling checkers. Under VMS the best spelling checker is by Spell program from Vassar. This program understands the TeX syntax AND will provide correct spelling guesses for the words mis-spelled. This program is available through the Decus tape library and is written is pascal. Under Unix, an excellent spelling checker is ispell. The ispell utility was distributed as part of the CMU Andrew System (or at least that is where I discovered it). This program can work stand alone or from within emacs. The program will not pick up the Tex commands as spelling errors and will provide correction guesses for the mis-spelled word. I have found that using ispell inside of emacs makes for an excellent Tex development environment. The ispell program was not written specifically for TeX but rather for the Andrew system. However the Andrew system uses the backslash character "\" to distinguish special andrew formatting commands so ispell ignores words starting with a backslash. Since this group is concerned with text processing many of you may find the andrew system interesting. As part of the system you get a WYSIWYG document editor, a spreadsheet (or table builder), a simplistic equation writer, and a simple draw program. The WYSIWYG editor allows you to easily include any of the above in a document. For simple non-structured documents it is an excellent system. Best of all is that it is free. It is part of the contrib library on the x11 R4 distribution.For journal articles or other text where pre-defined styles exist I still prefer TeX. If there is interest I can check into posting the ispell package to the clarkson tex archive. Jack Suess
adrian@mti.mti.com (Adrian McCarthy) (06/02/90)
In article <3374@umbc3.UMBC.EDU> jack@umbc5.umbc.edu.UUCP (Jack Suess) writes: >Adding my two cents on the topic of spelling checkers. Under VMS the best >spelling checker is by Spell program from Vassar. This program understands >the TeX syntax AND will provide correct spelling guesses for the words >mis-spelled. True, Vassar Spell is pretty good, but be aware of a few gotchas if decide to rely upon it. The versions I've seen (which come from the DECUS tape) have a small bug in the TeX filter that is a real pain if you do a lot of LaTeX stuff: the first word in braces after a macro (like `\section') is not checked, so beware of `\section{Instalashun procedure}'. Also be aware, that misspellings have slipped into the dictionary (e.g., `sherif' for `sheriff' and `evesdropping' for `eavesdropping'). >Jack Suess Aid. (adrian@gonzo.mti.com)